The Best American Poetry 2013 Read Online Free PDF Page B

Believer

ANDREI CODRESCU
Five One-Minute Eggs

    1. The Economy
    We used to make things we didn’t understand (Marx), consumed by
    people who didn’t understand us, and now we don’t even understand the
    people who are making them, that is us. Our misunderstandings progress.
    We consume things that are familiar, and the more familiar they get, the
    less we know or sympathize with ourselves, the people who make them.
    We are not familiar with the parts of these things that other people make,
    but we love to use them. Technology is familiar, people are not. The
    people who make TVs know us from TV better than we know them or
    ourselves. When we are not on TV, we are waiting to slit our (their)
    throats. The German economy thrives because Germans make “the thing
    that goes inside the thing that goes inside the thing.”
    Can you love people you don’t understand? With a blender and a mixer
    and an iPhone.
    The Jesuits would be pleased.
    Why would God need to choose a people when there are all these
    machines around.
    What else would He do with the Salvation Army warehouses?
    2. Pound in the Ozarks
    5 time grimace:
    pro patria
    pro domo
    pro usura
    pro forma
    pro pane
    3. Expansive Song
    Space is my Baby
    Time is my Bitch
    (with Vince Cellucci)
    4. I Broker
    â€œin this army you break down your body like a gun
    ascertain its needs and reassemble it for action when they’ve been met”
    The Manual
    splitting hairs for commodities
    the centrifugal force that dismembers matter into sellable minis
    the broker broke down his body and ordered its needs from a catalogue
    everything arrived by mail overnight and the broker reassembled
    hermself
    by the time the market opened
    herm hoped to make enough to post a profit
    on the increasing needs of herm body
    â€œevery day you don’t sell you buy”
    herm ever-expanding ever-needy body
    was an expense that had to be covered by greater profit
    so when herm body incorporated the city the country and the globe
    it had to be broken down and fed
    by myriads of catalogues from outer space
    whence the profits had to also eventually come
    today herm franchised copper on mars and sold
    the green algae noon meal of the cloned venus from last night
    i went to sleep without a shower and woke up malcontent
    but my daughters brought me time for breakfast
    i was happy with the design
    some retro some yet to be duplicated
    what counts is attitude
    5. San Michele
    it’s got to be raining in Venice
    to write like Henry James
    was never your wish in even
    the most twisted version of yourself
    from House Organ

BILLY COLLINS
Foundling

    How unusual to be living a life of continual self-expression,
    jotting down little things,
    noticing a leaf being carried down a stream,
    then wondering what will become of me,
    and finally to work alone under a lamp
    as if everything depended on this,
    groping blindly down a page,
    like someone lost in a forest.
    And to think it all began one night
    on the steps of a nunnery
    where I lay gazing up from a sewing basket,
    which was doubling for a proper baby carrier,
    staring into the turbulent winter sky,
    too young to wonder about anything
    including my recent abandonment—
    but it was there that I committed
    my first act of self-expression,
    sticking out my infant tongue
    and receiving in return (I can see it now)
    a large, pristine snowflake much like any other.
    from The Southampton Review and Slate

MARTHA COLLINS
[white paper 24]

    The Irish were not, the Germans
    were not, the Jews Italians Slavs and others
    were not, or were not exactly or not quite
    at various times in American history.
    Before us the Greeks themselves
    were not (though the weaker enemy
    Persians were), the next-up Romans
    themselves were not either.
    And later the Europeans were not
    until Linnaeus named by color,
    red white yellow and black.
    Even the English settlers were only
    vaguely at first to contrast with natives,
    but then with Africans, more