The American Poetry Review

Editor Elizabeth Scanlon Business Manager Mike Duffy Editorial Assistants Thalia Geiger Hannah Gellman General Counsel Dennis J. Brennan, Esq. Contributing Editors Christopher Buckley, Deborah Burnham, George Economou, Jan Freeman, Leonard Gontarek,

I The teenaged girl is searching for a placethat goes through, the holeto put the tampon inside. When she finds itshe asks her mother, Is this where the penis would go?Yes, her mother explains.Then I will never have sex. II Sweltering New York City.

Sometimes I feel like I’m writing the scorefor a film that doesn’t yet exist, but everything that will happenin the film will happen to me. Is this what they call plot? This dailypicking up of the same things— glasses, coffee cup, pen, book, keys—and

To Arthur Sze, dear friend, Keeper of the Acequia, now I remember … finding your poems in Tyuonyi, a small literary magazine published by the remarkable poet and editor Phillip Foss, during a time, the early 1980s, when both of you were teaching at t

What is it now, a most 40 years?Don’t think I’ve always missed you, sometimesI’ve forgotten you, you and your Ameriguns,the ones Dad found in your apartment after you diedand dumped in Powell’s Cove—Why? When you told me you’d learnedyour lesson—but

[Warmup line for no baby blubbering]no background noise whatever but midnightcowboy, a dank sense of vernacular:that Americana myth of motheringI plagiarized [every hint of love]the rough kind, the dirtiest, sparkling slitsin the diamond eyes of the

Alláde donde yo soy es el único lugardonde unopuede agarrarse de la noche—como de una baranda— para no caeren la oscuridad. There,where I come from, is the only place I knowwhere you cangrab the nightlike a railing to keep from fallingthrough the dar

You who held me all my life inside your hands —Jane Hirshfield Without your skeleton you’d just be a pile of meatLarry said in his studio above the post officeIt’s snowing in April ocean all aroundChris draws a body beside the doorWe both look down a

Jester-necked pile of ideasfattening by the cutting board.I have known the summer wall,it says slowly. The hillside facessouth into the valley.Dew on the tomato plants.Anything that grows, swarms,bunches itself against a stayand cannot stay. The vine

The last time we were together, I remember thinking that I could write an entire book about how much I love you and I didn’t care if you saw it or not. The breaking of a heart. An immense underground water. Going on even when you were not here, even

People let themselves down so hard they took to clappingwhen the plane lands. Sometimes even at the creditsof a movie. Their funerals turned out to be for the livingall along. You wouldn’t know how much they hatedcrowded trains by the way they kept b

You are sagging in my pocket. I cannot let you go.*Look, a beautiful person is dancing.*Wasn’t my face meant to be private? Wasn’t yours?*Think boots. Buy boots from a pop-up ad.*Webcam penguins waddle through a museum!*Alexa. What is this I’m feelin

Poets who want to respond to the climate crisis need to find ways to acknowledge its variously manifest and yet overwhelming realities. Climate change is not just another new topic; it demands new ways of thinking about and writing poetry. A climate-

I’m having agirl I haveher She has itin for me Idon’t have itin me The familyhas three peopleNow twoand a halfWhat do Ihave I haven’tany time tomyself I haven’tmy anymoreI have anMFA I havesome French I havea headache anda terrible nightahead It’s no

nothing so lonely as the hospitalbed. nothing so lonely as beinglonely in the hospital bed. nothingso jargoned as the body sproutingbrush tuber cannula or rue. nothingso pure as the abstracted by which Imean exploded body, the body thatholds its skin

I’m looking at a photograph of a bearded Romaine Tenney on his hay mowerhitched to draft horses in a half-cut field. Tenney, whose Vermont farm was slatedto be swallowed by Interstate 91, immolated himself, rather than be forciblymoved. My son says,

I held a birdin my hand. No. It was a game—a child’s game. No, my bird friend saidwhen he unstrung the mist net whereone bird hung mid- flight, between scruband sumac, by the slender path.Like this. He placed it so. In myopen palm—then closed my fing

I don’t know my blood type there’s no direct through-line I’ve never seena tree bearing my ancestry as its leaves I just know two people made methough they probably shouldn’t have I say probably because I am alive andliving well mystery isn’t my genr

My wife kneels with our sonin the moss. Our basketis hardly big enough to holdwhat we’ve found—oh what luck: “They’re like buttons at first,”she tells him. “Then, they turn into trumpets—” Sphagnum moss is like stars.The field of it constellates unde

It was not until February that I heard them. Minor tones underwater. Plaintive. Asking for others to hear. Hear and not to act. To witness the wonder of the ways in which light and sound travel and still underwater. I felt it in my pituitary gland fi

and boros, from bora, which in Greek means food,as in tail food, which is strange because usuallyfood is thought of as something other than self,but the larger you become, the more cosmosyou comprise, the less consumable othernessthere is, a shrinkin

I will never forget the first day of freshman English,when my teacher mentioned she was vegetarianand a pimpled boy in an orange-billed Giants cap asked whyin the way only teenagers do—ingenuine and genuineat the same time—and the teacher paused, con

I put no name to her, knowingI would kill her. Read the books again, by flashlightIn the lean-to just over the hill; coyotes Rushing the bush. In the middle of the seasonWhat happened to the last is where to begin.Know your lambs well and do not ask;

For a month, I have been living here,and often sit near the back bedroomwall, mice scuttling behind the tiny framed self portrait of Rembrandt,laughing, skin crinkled like gold leaf.He’s Zeuxis in that one, I think— Zeuxis and Parrhasius, I remembert