The Best American Poetry 2015 by David Lehman Read Free Book Online

olive sticks,
    with battered whore-ti-cultural beaks, and eastern screech.
    Flushed, too, every time The Yew Norker
    or one of Obi Wan Kenobi’s traitorous X Jedi Clampett hillbillies
    fresh prince’d us . . .
    The real religion,
    our “individual expressiveness”
    wasn’t dehuman-u-factured
    by a Greek HAARP
    in a Roman uni-dot-gov-versity.
    Where we Away
    our Steel, “flood”
    means “flow.”
    Where we Tenure
    our Ammo, “podium”
    means “drum.”
    Flood,
    flow.
    Podium,
    drum.
    Flood,
    drum.
    Podium,
    flow.
    Drum,
    podium.
    Flood,
    flow.
    Used to be a whole lot of chalk around the Ark,
    then anger, then angels, rehabbed wings made of fried white dust,
    fallen from when the board of knowledge was public and named
    after a stranger or [rich] crook, an anti-in immigrant-can’tameter
    stretched across the teepee-skin, chairs of class
    where we clapped
    the erasers,
    fifty snows old,
    like we were
    the first Abraham,
    where we clapped
    the Race Erasers
    and drove away
    from K James V and K Leo PB
    in shiny Lincolns,
    sprinkling holy sheeple from the sky,
    their
    powdery
    absolute
    Rule.
    Just add oil-water.
    Belongs
    to humanity.
    Just add sugar-rubber.
    Belongs
    to civilization.
    Gold.
    Days.
    Nights.
    Ounces.
    A forty.
    Mules move.
    A forty.
    Move.
    Move.
    Move
    mule.
    Whatyoumaycall “how we here” and get no
    response . . . how we . . . where we fear, how we hear how we sound and
    how sometimes [time is some] even our own sound fears us, faults us,
    and remembers the first us, confronting Columbus with thunderbolts,
    when “was-we” not good-citizen sober, “was-we” voting and drowning,
    and rotting like “we-was” the wrong targets of the armed guts of our
    own young?
    Now a daze,
    tribe-be-known,
    the devil
    the best historian we got.
    Anyhow.
    from Poetry

EMILY KENDAL FREY
----
In Memory of My Parents Who Are Not Dead Yet

    Is it harder for the bachelorette or her suitors?
    The brown oyster mushroom
    on her face is possibly the most perfect
    nose I have ever seen. I think people
    might actually win love. The funny guy always
    appeared safe but later you saw him
    in the dark green yard
    puking, a thin
    sweat on the back of his neck.
    I want the air I breathe
    to maintain my body’s
    mystery. I worry I’ll run into you at a party
    then I remember I don’t go to parties
    so I’m safe. I have no godly discipline.
    When someone yells I still huddle
    under a want for ice cream.
    How can you love people
    without them feeling accused?
    If I wanted to win
    I would draw harder lines
    and sit next to them, stay
    awake, rattle the box of bullets.
    When we touch my heart
    gets green
    and white, preppy, bordered,
    oh! she says and perks up.
    It hurts to not be everyone else. If love dies
    it was already dead.
    from Powder Keg

JAMES GALVIN
----
On the Sadness of Wedding Dresses

    On starless, windless nights like this
    I imagine
    I can hear the wedding dresses
    Weeping in their closets,
    Luminescent with hopeless longing,
    Like hollow angels.
    They know they will never be worn again.
    Who wants them now,
    After their one heroic day in the limelight?
    Yet they glow with desire
    In the darkness of closets.
    A few lucky wedding dresses
    Get worn by daughters—just once more,
    Then back to the closet.
    Most turn yellow over time,
    Yellow from praying
    For the moths to come
    And carry them into the sky.
    Where is your mother’s wedding dress,
    What closet?
    Where is your grandmother’s wedding dress?
    What, gone?
    Eventually they all disappear,
    Who knows where.
    Imagine a dump with a wedding dress on it.
    I saw one wedding dress, hopeful at Goodwill.
    But what sad story brought it there,
    And what sad story will take it away?
    Somewhere a closet is waiting for it.
    The luckiest wedding dresses
    Are those of wives
    Betrayed by their husbands
    A week after the wedding.
    They are flung outside the