The Best American Poetry 2012 Read Online Free PDF

you the sky exposes one
    or two real eagles, the water
    warm or marked with stones,
    however you like it, blue.
    from The New Yorker

HENRI COLE

    Broom

    A starkly lighted room with a tangy iron odor;
    a subterranean dankness; a metal showerhead hanging from the ceiling;
    a scalpel, a trocar, a pump; a white marble table; a naked, wrinkled
    body faceup on a sheet, with scrubbed skin, clean nails,
    and shampooed hair; its mouth sewn shut, with posed lips,
    its limbs massaged, its arteries drained, its stomach and intestines emptied;
    a pale blue sweater, artificial pearls, lipstick, and rouge;
    hands that once opened, closed, rolled, unrolled, rerolled, folded, unfolded,
    turned, and returned, as if breathing silver, unselfing themselves now
    (very painful); hands that once tore open, rended, ripped,
    served, sewed, and stroked (very loving), pushing and butting now
    with all their strength as their physiognomy fills with firming fluid;
    hands once raucous, sublime, quotidian—now strange, cruel, neat;
    hands that once chased me gruesomely with a broom, then brushed my hair.
    from The Threepenny Review

BILLY COLLINS

    Delivery

    Moon moving in the upper window,
    shadow of the pen in my hand on the page—
    I keep wishing that the news of my death
    will be delivered by a little wooden truck
    or a child’s drawing of a truck
    featuring the long rectangular box of the trailer,
    with some lettering on the side,
    then the protruding cab, the ovoid wheels,
    maybe the inscrutable profile of a driver,
    and of course puffs of white smoke
    issuing from the tail pipe, drawn like flowers
    and similar in their expression to the clouds in the sky only smaller.
    from Subtropics

PETER COOLEY

    More Than Twice, More Than I Can Count

    Down here, with my long wait for wings to grow
    I’m slow accepting the stars’ chart for me,
    the blind track written in my sky at birth.
    I have my glimpses, terrible and deep,
    moments when I can see a kind of plan,
    and more than twice tracing the lineaments
    in one of the live oaks in City Park
    New Orleans legend says were born with Christ,
    or in the face of a beautiful child
    or yes—why not say it—a flowering light
    hibiscus blossoms open and then close
    in sunlight’s entrance, exit through the cloud—
    say it: I’ve seen, head-on the face of God
    cracked, fractured, splintered, never what I want
    but mine, nevertheless and, yes, these wings’
    sutures, at more than half a century
    with me almost immeasurable in light,
    itch and lift me here where blue ground meets sky.
    For a few seconds I am only blue.
    I have my little time in Paradise.
    from Harvard Review

EDUARDO C. CORRAL

    To the Angelbeast

    for Arthur Russell
    All that glitters isn’t music.
    Once, hidden in tall grass,
    I tossed fistfuls of dirt into the air:
    doe after doe of leaping.
    You said it was nothing
    but a trick of the light. Gold
    curves. Gold scarves.
    Am I not your animal?
    You’d wait in the orchard for hours
    to watch a deer
    break from the shadows.
    You said it was like lifting a cello
    out of its black case.
    from Poetry

ERICA DAWSON

    Back Matter

    Semantics 2.0,
    Daughter, still, of absurdities,
    I like “street-talker” now. Yes, please.
    Breathless with ghetto woe
    (“. . . and his mama cried”) I’d call
    Me too American, too black,
    Too Negro dialect. My back
    Is to your front. I’m all
    Set with my Nikes on.
    *
    Back: as in “go,” sound on the tongue
    Articulated, clean, clearly hung
    In the aft of the mouth.
    *
    Back: dawn
    As near is to December. I
    Walk in the flakes as doctors try
    To drink their coffee, yawn
    In mittened hands while they
    Cross MLK and I decide
    To take the hill, walk farther, ride
    It out this Saturday,
    Cold, cocked, nothing.
    And Back:
    Pertaining to support; to cause
    To move backward; hems, haws,
    But strength, effort; no lack-
    Luster labor.
    *
    I put
    My back into it, start to sweat
    And feel the