The Best American Poetry 2013 Read Online Free PDF Page A

a lover could
    be like a god. But towels ? We’d just finished The House
    of the Seven Gables , and I wondered if
    Hepzibah or Phoebe ever sold linens in their shop. Yet
    we never hear Hawthorne talking about blankets or sheets or
    how anybody washes his face or her hands,
    let alone armpits or “soft-tickling genitals”—leave
    those to Uncle Walt. The store Hepzibah opened: a first step
    in leaving the shadows of her cursed
    ancestors, of joining the sunlit world. Last summer
    when my husband and I moved back into our old house after
    a massive redo, we gave away box after box
    of sweaters and tchotchkes. We even disposed of old
    books, including those with my neon markings in the margins
    blunt as Gary’s outbursts in class: “Ugh,”
    â€œNO,” and “Wow!” It was time to loosen the mind
    beyond the nub of the old self. My mother used to huff through
    the house every year like a great wind,
    and when she settled down, not a doll over
    twelve months old remained, not a dress, not a scarf, not even
    lint wisping in a drawer. One year during
    a flood, my husband’s letters from lifelong friends
    drowned in the garage, morphed back into pulp. I never hoped
    the past would vanish into a blank, and yet,
    when Holgrave in the novel cries, “Shall we never,
    never get rid of this Past!” I, too, want it washed clean, to wake
    in the morning released from echoes
    of my father’s muttered invectives, my mother’s
    searing tongue. I’ve now torn to rags the rust-stained
    towels from my former marriage and
    my husband’s bachelorhood linens, raveled
    threads drooping like fishnets. How Hawthorne’s Phoebe
    opened that heavy-lidded house
    to the light. I used to scorn her chirpy domesticity,
    praying along with Emily Dickinson—whose balance
    Gary had also questioned—“God keep me
    from what they call households .” And yet, after
    my husband and I returned to our remade, renewed house,
    what did I do but go shopping
    for towels. Back and forth to seven strip malls,
    bringing home only to return I don’t know how many colors,
    till, finally, I settled on white. And as I
    pulled out my MasterCard to pay for the contents of
    my brimming cart, a gaunt, wrinkled man entered the check-out
    line, hands pressing to his chest
    two white towels just like mine, eyes lifted
    to the fluorescent ceiling as if in prayer. I doubt that Gary
    would think it normal to greet the divine
    while clutching terry cloth. But now I see that Whitman
    knew what fresh towels could mean for a dazed and puffy
    face, white towels unspecked by blood
    or errant coils of hair, towels that spill from
    a laundry basket like sea-foam. Like cirrus clouds adrift while
    we’re loafing on tender, newly sprouted
    blades of grass growing from the loam under our boot soles,
    from graves of the old and decaying, all we’ve finally buried.
    from The Southern Review

JAN BEATTY
Youngest Known Savior

    They talk in that natural       way shortcuts like: got it
    or       second shelf/left side       and she thinks:
    oh my god, they talk alike      her cousins
    all have long eyelashes        [each one the same
    black lash, naturally curled]       She feels like she’s falling
    deeper into alone       She goes      into the bedroom
    with the pink sleeping thing      [baby]
    she hates it      for how it lies there      how it
    didn’t have to      do anything      to get those same eyelashes
    [white crib, ruffles]       Only a 3 foot drop,
    she thinks      Later she tells them      [trying to approximate
    their truncated speech]:       She fell out of the crib
    and I put