The Best American Poetry 2012 Read Online Free PDF Page B

Sempiternam, wet,
    There in the skin afoot,
    All itchy, from the needle
    (Wednesday’s fresh ink). I turn and head
    For red EMERGENCY—
    hot bed,
    A microcosm, beetle
    Of Cincinnati streets
    Where pigs have got a man spread-eagle,
    Cuffed to a gurney with the legal
    Miranda said, the beats
    Of EKGs, the blood
    Of GS to the chest,
    STAT angiectomy,
    last rites,
    Urban Gethsemane, left bites
    Of Jell-O.
    *
    Back: to rest;
    Arrears or overdue;
    Belonging to the past like back
    In the day.
    *
    The once-crazy could crack—
    *
    The defending player who,
    Behind the other players, makes
    First contact—
    *
    Streets are talking, rakes
    Catcalling, and the new
    Sky’s crisp as all the streams
    Of frozen runoff.
    There’s no help
    For me, just voices: barest yelp,
    Incessant chatter, screams;
    It’s my emergency,
    My good-luck charm, my fetish carved
    In brain waves; and, I’m fucking starved
    For more synecdoche—
    More forms: the water-trickle
    When it melts in spring, the med(evac!),
    A glass door sliding off its track—
    A million worlds to tickle
    My fancy.
    â€œMa’am, you next?”
    I leave the hospital and walk
    For milk, though I need none. I stalk
    A flying flier, text
    Muddied by snow and now
    Unreadable.
    *
    Back is the how
    You know where you have been; the Tao;
    â€œWhat up”; instead of “ciao,”
    â€œPeace”; “One”; a vision too
    Damn visible in memory.
    *
    Only I have to listen. See?
    I’m still the jigaboo.
    Don’t see me as I butt
    In highs and lows and every nome
    And phoneme while on my way home
    To lay back in the cut.
    from Barrow Street

STEPHEN DUNN

    The Imagined

    If the imagined woman makes the real woman
    seem bare-boned, hardly existent, lacking in
    gracefulness and intellect and pulchritude,
    and if you come to realize the imagined woman
    can only satisfy your imagination, whereas
    the real woman with all her limitations
    can often make you feel good, how, in spite
    of knowing this, does the imagined woman
    keep getting into your bedroom, and joining you
    at dinner, why is it that you always bring her along
    on vacations when the real woman is shopping,
    or figuring the best way to the museum?
    And if the real woman
    has an imagined man, as she must, someone
    probably with her at this very moment, in fact
    doing and saying everything she’s ever wanted,
    would you want to know that he slips in
    to her life every day from a secret doorway
    she’s made for him, that he’s present even when
    you’re eating your omelette at breakfast,
    or do you prefer how she goes about the house
    as she does, as if there were just the two of you?
    Isn’t her silence, finally, loving? And yours
    not entirely self-serving? Hasn’t the time come,
    once again, not to talk about it?
    from The New Yorker

ELAINE EQUI

    A Story Begins

    The same as other stories, but we follow along in case something different might happen.
    Just one different thing. It leads us to a ledge and pushes us over.
    Every story has a climax in a way life doesn’t.
    It puts us back where it found us. It opens our eyes which weren’t closed, but felt that way because what we saw was happening inside the story.
    We are the excess of the story—that which it cannot contain.
    Washed ashore.
    What was the story about?
    I can’t remember. A dwindling, dim-witted tribe.
    Every month when the moon was full, they’d sacrifice another virgin, but could never figure out why the crops still wouldn’t grow.
    from New American Writing

ROBERT GIBB

    Spirit in the Dark

    What to make of the night we sat up late,
    Listening to Beethoven’s Ninth
    In that otherwise darkened apartment?
    The New York Philharmonic
    Was gathering together the fragments
    At the fourth movement’s start—
    Momentum they’d ride like a wave
    Through the fanfare and final chorus—
    When we felt something else enter the air,
    A front in the