Excerpt from the book Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century

Many Are Called
by Rick Barot

to burn at least one thing they once owned: she tears

the page from his book and sets light to whatever

she said to him there, words to smoke, paper

to black snow. She would like a sleep as big as

a building, whose key she firmly keeps in her hand,

its teeth writing into her palm. Be as nothing

in the floods, I read yesterday on the bus home,

which was a way of saying that in the dimmed glass

all of us and none of us could be found. But one

face was like sun reflecting on ice, lit by what

the Walkman poured into it, its champagnes. One

made me think of the mushroom in the woods

like a face pressed to a photocopier's flash,

the face and its goofy pain. Many are called to save

what they can: he rolls up his pants and wades

into the fountain, where the gull has its leg caught

on a wire. The bird flaps away to join the wheeling

others, their strokes on the air like diacritical

marks over the sentences uttered below them.

A friend writes about how cold he had been, nearly

drowned in the spring-melt river when the horse

tipped over. It is months away now, but still

I have him there, in the darkening field, the fireflies

a roused screensaver. Many are called to close

upon themselves like circles: Kafka, waking because

a dog is lying on him. He doesn't open his eyes

but he can feel its weight, its paw smelling

faintly of hay. Or the woman crying in the park,

her shopping cart tumbled, shoes and cans spilled out

like junk from a shark's stomach. Or the man

He must dwell quietly. Many are called to form

a deity out of what they know: he quizzes me

on the capital of every African country, he paints

his toenails silver because I ask him. A friend writes

about the church where a fresco will always show

them: cleanly naked at first, then full of the blame

of their own guile, then clothed, worried with age,

the woman in her room setting fire to something

she had, the man in the meadow, wishing his rib back.

I Love How Your Eyes Close Every Time You Kiss Me

a line from a song by Bobby Vinton

by Erica Bernheim

You are alone and you are easy. You see

the history of your life and lineage in your

mitochondrial genes, cells, confirming what

we suspected: bottleneck, enlargement, plague,

vulcanologists from everywhere, studying the

site, thinking aren't you a cute disease. The

music is so loud you blink every time there is

a drum. Yes, best we heirloom quietly, for we

are powerful weak. Overcoat, spread your wings.

Almost a legend, knots laced with passed-over

glass, daddies in pastel suits next to the only

surviving witness from a life best spent in big years,

dreaming of sliding on your belly. Tough night,

wet ink, loose seams. There is plenty of time for

nothing and you should volunteer for it. Time allotted

is never enough. Roll over and tell me you're a

sofa, backboned by an old quilt, tied to the notion

of design, of pattern, of words so staccato they bang

like rats atop the roofs of government embassies,

that is, without regard for what those below will

try to assume you are: harmless and preoccupied,

known through your gestures to be true.

The ropey cuisine of another planet awaits you

tonight, something freeze-dried and wet

just for you, and molded into whatever you

want: lids and caps, some beans or rice, coelacanth,

but the remains will leave their fossils

on your plate. Memory is like this, patterns

already laid out across neurons and blisters,

each occasion which follows will fit

into that shape, even sans arms or eyelashes,

rendered sharp-tongued with bad desire.

The Elephant

by Dan Chiasson



How to explain my heroic courtesy? I feel

that my body was inflated by a mischievous boy.



I was the size of a falcon, the size of a lion,

once I was not the elephant I find I am.



My pelt sags, and my master scolds me for a botched

trick. I practiced it all night in my tent, so I was



somewhat sleepy. People connect me with sadness

and, often, rationality. Randall Jarrell compared me



to Wallace Stevens, the American poet. I can see it

in the lumbering tercets, but to my mind


I am more like Eliot, a man of Europe, a man

of cultivation. Anyone so ceremonious suffers



breakdowns. I do not like the spectacular experiments

with balance, the high-wire act and cones.



We elephants are images of humility, as when we

undertake our melancholy migrations to die.



Did you know, though, that elephants were taught

to write the Greek alphabet with their hooves?



Worn out by suffering, we lie on our great backs,

tossing grass up to heaven--as a distraction, not a prayer.



That’s not humility you see, on our long final journeys:

it’s procrastination. It hurts my heavy body to lie down.

Sweet Reader, Flanneled and Tulled

by Olena Kalytiak Davis



Reader unmov’d and Reader unshaken, Reader unseduc’d

and unterrified, through the long–loud and sweet–still

I creep toward you. Toward you, I thistle and I climb.



I crawl, Reader, servile and cervine, through this blank

season, counting—I sleep and I sleep. I sleep,

Reader, toward you, loud as a cloud and deaf, Reader, deaf



as a leaf. Reader: Why don’t you turn

pale? and, Why don’t you tremble? Jaded, staid

Reader, You—who can read this and not even



flinch. Bare–faced, flint–hearted, recoilless

Reader, dare you—Rare Reader, listen

and be convinced: Soon, Reader,



soon you will leave me, for an italian mistress:

for her dark hair, and her moon–lit

teeth. For her leopardi and her cavalcanti,



for her lips and clavicles; for what you want

to eat, eat, eat. Art–lover, rector, docent!

Do I smile? I, too, once had a brash artless



feeder: his eye set firm on my slackening

sky. He was true! He was thief! In the celestial sense

he provided some, some, some



(much-needed) relief. Reader much–slept with, and Reader I will die

without touching, You, Reader, You: mr. small–

weed, mr. broad–cloth, mr. long–dark–day. And the italian mis–



fortune you will heave me for, for

her dark hair and her moonlit–teeth. You will love her well in–

to three–or–four cities, and then, you will slowly



sink. Reader, I will never forgive you, but not, poor

cock-sure Reader, not, for what you think. O, Reader

Sweet! And Reader Strange! Reader Deaf and Reader



Dear, I understand youyourself may be hard–

pressed to bare this small and un–necessary burden

having only just recently gotten over the clean clean heart–



break of spring. And I, Reader, I am but the daughter

of a tinker. I am not above the use of bucktail spinners,

white grubs, minnow tails. Reader, worms



and sinkers. Thisandthese curtail me

to be brief: Reader, our sex gone

to wildweather. YesReaderYes—that feels much–much



better (And my new Reader will come to me empty–

handed, with a countenance that roses, lavenders, and cakes.

And my new Reader will be only mildly disappointed.



My new Reader can wait, can wait, can wait.) Light–

minded, snow-blind, nervous, Reader, Reader, troubled, Reader,

what’d ye lack? Importunate, unfortunate, Reader:



You are cold. You are sick. You are silly.

Forgive me, kind Reader, forgive me, I had not intended to step this quickly this far

back. Reader, we had a quiet wedding: he&I theparson



&theclerk. Would I could, stead-fast, gracilefacile Reader! Last,

good Reader, tarry with me, jessa-mine Reader. Dar–

(jee)ling, bide! Bide, Reader, tired, and stay, stay, stray Reader,



true. R.: I had been secretly hoping this would turn into a love

poem. Disconsolate. Illiterate. Reader,

I have cleared this space for you, for you, for you.



Boot Theory

by Richard Siken



A man walks into a bar and says:

Take my wife--please.

So you do.

You take her out into the rain and you fall in love with her

and she leaves you and you’re desolate.

You’re on your back in your undershirt, a broken man

on an ugly bedspread, staring at the water stains

on the ceiling.

And you can hear the man in the apartment above you

taking off his shoes.

You hear the first boot hit the floor and you’re looking up,

you’re waiting

because you thought it would follow, you thought there would be

some logic, perhaps, something to pull it all together

but here we are in the weeds again,

here we are

in the bowels of the thing: your world doesn’t make sense.

And then the second boot falls.

And then a third, a fourth, a fifth.



A man walks into a bar and says:

Take my wife--please.

But you take him instead.

You take him home, and you make him a cheese sandwich,

and you try to get his shoes off, but he kicks you

and he keeps kicking you.

You swallow a bottle of sleeping pills but they don’t work.

Boots continue to fall to the floor

in the apartment above you.

You go to work the next day pretending nothing happened.

Your co-workers ask

if everything’s okay and you tell them

you’re just tired.

And you’re trying to smile. And they’re trying to smile.



A man walks into a bar, you this time, and says:

Make it a double.

A man walks into a bar, you this time, and says:

Walk a mile in my shoes.

A man walks into a convenience store, still you, saying:

I only wanted something simple, something generic...

But the clerk tells you to buy something or get out.

A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river

but then he’s still left

with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away

but then he’s still left with his hands.





Duende

by Tracy K. Smith



1.

The earth is dry and they live wanting.

Each with a small reservoir

Of furious music heavy in the throat.

They drag it out and with nails in their feet

Coax the night into being. Brief believing.

A skirt shimmering with sequins and lies.

And in this night that is not night,

Each word is a wish, each phrase

A shape their bodies ache to fill--



I’m going to braid my hair

Braid many colors into my hair

I’ll put a long braid in my hair

And write your name there



They defy gravity to feel tugged back.

The clatter, the mad slap of landing.





2.

And not just them. Not just

The ramshackle family, the tios,

Primitos, not just the bailaor

Whose heels have notched

And hammered time

So the hours flow in place

Like a tin river, marking

Only what once was.

Not just the voices scraping

Against the river, nor the hands

nudging them farther, fingers

like blind birds, palms empty,

echoing. Not just the women

with sober faces and flowers

in their hair, the ones who dance

as though they’re burying

memory--one last time--

beneath them.

And I hate to do it here.

To set myself heavily beside them.

Not now that they’ve proven

The body a myth, parable

For what not even language

Moves quickly enough to name.

If I call it pain, and try to touch it

With my hands, my own life,

It lies still and the music thins,

A pulse felt for through garments.

If I lean into the desire it starts from--

If I lean unbuttoned into the blow

Of loss after loss, love tossed

Into the ecstatic void--

It carries me with it farther,

To chords that stretch and bend

Like light through colored glass.

But it races on, toward shadows

Where the world I know

And the world I fear

Threaten to meet.





3.

There is always a road,

The sea, dark hair, dolor.



Always a question

Bigger than itself--



They say you’re leaving Monday

Why can’t you leave on Tuesday?