American Journal Read online

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  AMERICAN JOURNAL

  BOOKS BY TRACY K. SMITH

  Poetry

  The Body’s Question

  Duende

  Life on Mars

  Wade in the Water

  Memoir

  Ordinary Light

  AMERICAN JOURNAL

  FIFTY POEMS FOR OUR TIME

  SELECTED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

  TRACY K. SMITH

  GRAYWOLF PRESS

  IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  Permission acknowledgments appear on pages 115–120.

  The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

  Published by Graywolf Press, in association with the Library of Congress

  250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

  Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

  All rights reserved.

  www.graywolfpress.org

  Published in the United States of America

  Printed in Canada

  ISBN 978-1-55597-838-9 (cloth)

  ISBN 978-1-55597-815-0 (paper)

  ISBN 978-1-55597-867-9 (ebook)

  2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

  First Graywolf Printing, 2018

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018934515 (cloth), 2018934515 (paper)

  Cover design: Kyle G. Hunter

  Cover art: Upper left: In 1993, Thomas Crawford’s Statue of Freedom was removed by helicopter from the U.S. Capitol dome for restoration. Washington, D.C., by Carol Highsmith, 1993. Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-highsm-13969. Upper right: Maria Gomez, 3466 2nd Ave., LA, by Camilo José Vergara, 2003. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-vrg-00309. Lower left: Richard Ortiz is a migrant worker in Nipomo, California, where famous photographer Dorothea Lange took a photograph of the Migrant Mother, Florence Owens Thompson in the 1930s, by Carol Highsmith, 2013. The Jon B. Lovelace Collection of California Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith’s America Project, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-highsm-25212. Lower right (top): “Sno-cone” stand, New Orleans, Louisiana, by Carol Highsmith, between 1980 and 2006. Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-highsm-13991. Lower right (bottom): Aerial view of mountaintop removal, approaching Racine, by Lyntha Scott Eiler, 1995. Coal River Folklife Collection (AFC 1999/008), Library of Congress, American Folklife Center.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction: This Is Why by Tracy K. Smith

  I. THE SMALL TOWN OF MY YOUTH

  “Second Estrangement” by Aracelis Girmay

  “In Defense of Small Towns” by Oliver de la Paz

  “’N’em” by Jericho Brown

  “Flat as a Flitter” by Melissa Range

  “Sugar and Brine: Ella’s Understanding” by Vievee Francis

  “The Field Trip” by Ellen Bryant Voigt

  “Mighty Pawns” by Major Jackson

  from “summer, somewhere” by Danez Smith

  “Walking Home” by Marie Howe

  “Music from Childhood” by John Yau

  “Girls Overheard While Assembling a Puzzle” by Mary Szybist

  “Passing” by Charif Shanahan

  II. SOMETHING SHINES OUT FROM EVERY DARKNESS

  “‘Let me tell you about my marvelous god’” by Susan Stewart

  “Sister as Moving Object” by Jan Beatty

  from “The Split” by Susan Wheeler

  “The Hypno-Domme Speaks, and Speaks and Speaks” by Patricia Lockwood

  “The Poet at Fifteen” by Erika L. Sánchez

  “My Brother at 3 AM” by Natalie Diaz

  “Reverse Suicide” by Matt Rasmussen

  “Charlottesville Nocturne” by Charles Wright

  “Downhearted” by Ada Limón

  “becoming a horse” by Ross Gay

  “After the Diagnosis” by Christian Wiman

  “Heart/mind” by Laura Kasischke

  III. WORDS TANGLED IN DEBRIS

  “Who’s Who” by Cathy Park Hong

  “Minimum Wage” by Matthew Dickman

  “Proximities” by Lia Purpura

  “Story of Girls” by Tina Chang

  “Fourth Grade Autobiography” by Donika Kelly

  “No” by Joy Harjo

  “The Long Deployment” by Jehanne Dubrow

  from “Personal Effects” by Solmaz Sharif

  “We Lived Happily during the War” by Ilya Kaminsky

  “Phantom Noise” by Brian Turner

  “Ten Drumbeats to God” by Nathalie Handal

  IV. HERE, THE SENTENCE WILL BE RESPECTED

  “38” by Layli Long Soldier

  V. ONE SINGING THING

  “Elegy” by Natasha Trethewey

  “Object Permanence” by Nicole Sealey

  “Crowning” by Kevin Young

  “Hurricane” by Yona Harvey

  “Requiem for Fifth Period and the Things That Went on Then” by Eve L. Ewing

  “Dear P.” by Victoria Chang

  “Lines for Little Mila” by Norman Dubie

  “Mercy” by Patrick Phillips

  “Apparition” by Mark Doty

  “At Pegasus” by Terrance Hayes

  “Scorch Marks” by Dara Wier

  “Dog Talk” by Robin Coste Lewis

  “Romanticism 101” by Dean Young

  “For the Last American Buffalo” by Steve Scafidi

  AMERICAN JOURNAL

  INTRODUCTION: THIS IS WHY

  This is why I love poems: they invite me to sit down and listen to a voice speaking thoughtfully and passionately about what it feels like to be alive. Usually the someone doing the talking—the poem’s speaker—is a person I’d never get the chance to meet were it not for the poem. Because the distance between us is too great. Or because we are too unlike one another to ever feel this at ease face-to-face. Or maybe because the person talking to me never actually existed as anything other than a figment of a poet’s imagination, a character invented for reasons I may not ever know. Even when that someone is the real-life poet speaking of things that have actually happened, there is something different—some new strength, vulnerability, or authority—that the poem fosters. This is why I love poems: they require me to sit still, listen deeply, and imagine putting myself in someone else’s unfamiliar shoes. The world I return to when the poem is over seems fuller and more comprehensible as a result.

  American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time is an offering for people who love poems the way I do. It is also an offering for t
hose who love them in different ways, and those who don’t yet know what their relationship with poetry will be. I hope there is even something here to please readers who, for whatever the reason, might feel themselves to be at odds with poetry. These fifty poems—culled from living American poets of different ages, backgrounds, and aesthetic approaches, and with different views of what it feels like to be alive—welcome you to listen and be surprised, amused, consoled. These poems invite you to remember something you once knew, to see something you’ve never seen, and to range from one set of concerns to another. For the time that you are reading them, and even after, these poems will collapse the distance between you and fifty different real or imagined people with fifty different outlooks on the human condition.

  But how? How do poems capture the significant yet hard-to-describe events and feelings punctuating our lives, and our time?

  Poems call upon sounds and silence to operate like music. They invoke vivid sensory images to make abstract feelings like love or anger or doubt feel solid and unmistakable. Like movies, poems slow time down or speed it up; they cross cut from one viewpoint to another as a way of discerning connections between unlikely things; they use line and stanza breaks to create suspense. Even the visual layout of words on the page is a device to help conduct a reader’s movement through the encounter that is the poem. These and other tools help poems call our attention to moments when the ordinary nature of experience changes—when the things we think we know flare into brighter colors, starker contrasts, strange and intoxicating possibilities.

  There’s something else these fifty poems are up to. As the title American Journal suggests, they are contemplating what it feels like to live, work, love, strive, raise a family, and survive many kinds of loss in this vast and varied nation. The great poet Robert Hayden, from Detroit, Michigan, was the first African American to serve in the role now known as Poet Laureate of the United States. His final collection contains an extraordinary poem called “[American Journal],” which is written in the voice of an alien from outer space sent to earth to observe humankind. On this planet, the speaker finds himself most drawn to “the americans,” whom he calls “this baffling multi people.” He recognizes America as a land of contrasts and contradictions, a place still new, still reckoning with the implications of its history. While much of life in this nation strikes him as strange, some of what he observes people doing reaches him as familiar:

  like us they have created a veritable populace

  of machines that serve and soothe and pamper

  and entertain we have seen their flags and

  foot prints on the moon also the intricate

  rubbish left behind a wastefully ingenious

  people many it appears worship the Unknowable

  Essence the same for them as for us

  And some of it, he finds perplexing:

  america as much a problem in metaphysics as

  it is a nation earthly entity an iota in our

  galaxy an organism that changes even as i

  examine it fact and fantasy never twice the

  same so many variables

  Like many poets, Hayden allows his poem’s speaker to build upon what may be the poet’s own complicated relationship to his subject matter. This figure from another planet, who moves through human society without ever being fully integrated into it or understood by his peers, provides the poet with the occasion and the means to explore the real-life experience of social alienation, of being a part of—and yet also at times apart from—a larger group.

  I’m drawn to Hayden’s poem because it paints a loving yet critical portrait of a nation in progress, and because it emphasizes the many forms that Americanness takes. In borrowing its title, I’m hoping to make space for new reports on the American experience in our time.

  These fifty poems take up stories old and new, and traditions deeply rooted and newly arrived. They bear witness to the daily struggles and promises of community, as well as to the times when community eludes us. They celebrate us and the natural world, and bow in reverence to the mysterious unknown. They do this and, inevitably, a great deal more. I am also hoping that their courage, intimacy of address, and even the journey they collectively map out—a journey that encompasses consideration of place; reflections on family and individual identity; responses to the urgencies affecting our collective culture; and gestures of love, hope, and remembrance—might go some way toward making us, whoever and wherever we are, a little less alien to one another.

  Tracy K. Smith

  Princeton, New Jersey

  I. THE SMALL TOWN OF MY YOUTH

  ARACELIS GIRMAY

  Second Estrangement

  Please raise your hand,

  whomever else of you

  has been a child,

  lost, in a market

  or a mall, without

  knowing it at first, following

  a stranger, accidentally

  thinking he is yours,

  your family or parent, even

  grabbing for his hands,

  even calling the word

  you said then for “Father,”

  only to see the face

  look strangely down, utterly

  foreign, utterly not the one

  who loves you, you

  who are a bird suddenly

  stunned by the glass partitions

  of rooms.

  How far

  the world you knew, & tall,

  & filled, finally, with strangers.

  OLIVER DE LA PAZ

  In Defense of Small Towns

  When I look at it, it’s simple, really. I hated life there. September,

  once filled with animal deaths and toughened hay. And the smells

  of fall were boiled-down beets and potatoes

  or the farmhands’ breeches smeared with oil and diesel

  as they rode into town, dusty and pissed. The radio station

  split time between metal and Tejano, and the only action

  happened on Friday nights where the high school football team

  gave everyone a chance at forgiveness. The town left no room

  for novelty or change. The sheriff knew everyone’s son and despite that,

  we’d cruise up and down the avenues, switching between

  brake and gearshift. We’d fight and spit chew into Big Gulp cups

  and have our hearts broken nightly. In that town I learned

  to fire a shotgun at nine and wring a chicken’s neck

  with one hand by twirling the bird and whipping it straight like a towel.

  But I loved the place once. Everything was blonde and cracked

  and the irrigation ditches stretched to the end of the earth. You could

  ride on a bicycle and see clearly the outline of every leaf

  or catch on the streets each word of a neighbor’s argument.

  Nothing could happen there and if I willed it, the place would have me

  slipping over its rocks into the river with the sugar plant’s steam

  or signing papers at a storefront army desk, buttoned up

  with medallions and a crew cut, eyeing the next recruits.

  If I’ve learned anything, it’s that I could be anywhere,

  staring at a hunk of asphalt or listening to the clap of billiard balls

  against each other in a bar and hear my name. Indifference now?

  Some. I shook loose, but that isn’t the whole story. The fact is

  I’m still in love. And when I wake up, I watch my son yawn,

  and my mind turns his upswept hair into cornstalks

  at the edge of a field. Stillness is an acre, and his body

  idles, deep like heavy machinery. I want to take him back there,

  to the small town of my youth and hold the book of wildflowers

  open for him, and look. I want him to know the colors of horses,

  to run with a cattail in his hand and watch as its seeds

  fly weig
htless as though nothing mattered, as though

  the little things we tell ourselves about our pasts stay there,

  rising slightly and just out of reach.

  JERICHO BROWN

  ’N’em

  They said to say goodnight

  And not goodbye, unplugged

  The TV when it rained. They hid

  Money in mattresses

  So to sleep on decisions.

  Some of their children

  Were not their children. Some

  Of their parents had no birthdates.

  They could sweat a cold out

  Of you. They’d wake without

  An alarm telling them to.

  Even the short ones reached

  Certain shelves. Even the skinny

  Cooked animals too quick

  To catch. And I don’t care

  How ugly one of them arrived,

  That one got married

  To somebody fine. They fed

  Families with change and wiped

  Their kitchens clean.

  Then another century came.

  People like me forgot their names.

  MELISSA RANGE

  Flat as a Flitter

  The way you can crush a bug

  or stomp drained cans of Schlitz out on the porch,

  the bread when it won’t rise,

  the cake when it falls after the oven-door slams—

  the old people had their way

  to describe such things. “But what’s a flitter?”

  I always asked my granny. And she could never say.

  “It’s just a flitter. Well, it might be a fritter.”

  “Then why not say ‘fritter’?”

  “Shit, Melissa. Because the old people said ‘flitter.’”

  And she smacked the fried pie into the skillet,

  and banged the skillet on the stove,

  and shook and turned the pie