The Best American Poetry 2013 Read Online Free PDF

her back       [afterwards, in the bathroom,
    she uses her cousin’s eyelash curler]      How could she
    learn their careful walk      the way they      move their heads
    slight/left      She is 10      one of the youngest known
    saviors      it’s better now      Before today,
    it was so tedious:       blood is blood       and
    she was never      one of them         [that was
    before today]      before she learned      the language
    from Redivider

BRUCE BOND
The Unfinished Slave

    after Michelangelo
    The man we see writhing in the marble,
    what is he without the strength of all
    we do not see. A slave, we are told,
    though to what: the rock, the king, the world
    that, cut or uncut, we can’t remember.
    To be distinct, chiseled as a number
    across a grave, that was his dream once.
    If only he could shake the rough stone
    from his back, instead of being one.
    Or if he stood naked before the tomb
    he was meant to guard, perhaps then
    he would wear a god’s glass complexion.
    As is, he is abstract, and so closer
    to us, to the life that makes a future
    the anticipated past, our heads half
    buried, blind, disfigured by the stuff
    to which we owe our restlessness, our art.
    The hand that carves its figure in the slate
    abandons it, thinking it will lie
    beneath its work some day, beneath a sky
    that refuses to commit, to lift.
    It’s in there somewhere, whatever’s left
    of those who drive a hammer into us.
    With every blow, a little bloom of dust
    flies. Time keeps its promise to itself.
    from The Antioch Review

TRACI BRIMHALL
Dear Thanatos,

    I did what you told me to,
    wore antlers and the mask, danced
    in the untilled field, but the promised
    ladder never dropped from the sky.
    In the burned house strays ate bats
    on the attic floor, and trotted out
    into the dark with wings in their mouths.
    I found the wedding dress unharmed,
    my baby teeth sewn to the cuff.
    There’s a deer in the woman, a moth
    in the chimney, a mote in God’s one good eye.
    The fire is on the table now, the bear is in
    the cradle now, and the baby is gone.
    She’s the box of bones under the bed,
    the stitches in your lip, the moon and the hollow
    in the geode, in peaches heavy with June.
    If I enter the river I must learn how to swim.
    If a wolf’s ribs are bigger than a man’s,
    and if the dead float, then I am the witch’s
    second heart, and I am the sea in the boat.
    from FIELD

JERICHO BROWN
Hustle

    They lie like stones and dare not shift. Even asleep, everyone hears in prison.
    Dwayne Betts deserves more than this dry ink for his teenage years in prison.
    In the film we keep watching, Nina takes Darius to a steppers ball.
    Lovers hustle, slide, dip as if one of them has no brother in prison.
    I dine with humans who think any book full of black characters is about race.
    A book full of white characters examines insanity near—but never in—prison.
    His whole family made a barricade of their bodies at the door to room 403.
    He died without the man he wanted. What use is love at home or in prison?
    We saw police pull sharks out of the water just to watch them not breathe.
    A brother meets members of his family as he passes the mirrors in prison.
    Sundays, I washed and dried her clothes after he threw them into the yard.
    In the novel I love, Brownfield kills his wife, only gets seven years in prison.
    I don’t want to point my own sinful finger, so let’s use your clean one instead.
    Some bright citizen reading this never considered a son’s short hair in prison.
    In our house lived three men with one name, and all three fought or ran.
    I left Nelson Demery III for Jericho Brown, a name I earned in prison.
    from The