The Best American Poetry 2014 Read Online Free

will hunger teach you to forgive? How will hunger teach you how to love? 14. Look out the window. It’s all hunger and war. Hunger and war. Hunger and war. And the endless pride of lions.
    from Hanging Loose

RAE ARMANTROUT
----
Control

    We are learning to control our thoughts,
    to set obtrusive thoughts aside.
    It takes an American
    to do really big things.
    Often I have no thoughts to push against.
    It’s lonely in a song
    about outer space.
    When I don’t have any thoughts,
    I want one!
    A close-up reveals
    that she has chosen
    a plastic soap dish
    in the shape of a giant sea turtle.
    Can a thought truly be mine
    if I am not currently thinking it?
    There are two sides
    to any argument;
    one arm
    in each sleeve.
    *
    Maybe I am always meditating,
    if by that you mean
    searching for a perfect
    stranger.
    from A Public Space

JOHN ASHBERY
----
Breezeway

    Someone said we needed a breezeway
    to bark down remnants of super storm Elias jugularly.
    Alas it wasn’t my call.
    I didn’t have a call or anything resembling one.
    You see I have always been a rather dull-spirited winch.
    The days go by and I go with them.
    A breeze falls from a nearby tower
    finds no breezeway, goes away
    along a mission to supersize red shutters.
    Alas if that were only all.
    There’s the children’s belongings to be looked to
    if only one can find the direction needed
    and stuff like that.
    I said we were all homers not homos
    but my voice dwindled in the roar of Hurricane Edsel.
    We have to live out our precise experimentation.
    Otherwise there’s no dying for anybody,
    no crisp rewards.
    Batman came out and clubbed me.
    He never did get along with my view of the universe
    except you know existential threads
    from the time of the peace beaters and more.
    He patted his dog Pastor Fido.
    There was still so much to be learned
    and even more to be researched.
    It was like a goodbye. Why not accept it,
    anyhow? The mission girls came through the woods
    in their special suitings. It was all whipped cream and baklava.
    Is there a Batman somewhere, who notices us
    and promptly looks away, at a new catalog, say,
    or another racing car expletive
    coming back at Him?
    from The New Yorker

ERIN BELIEU
----
With Birds

    It’s all Romeo and Juliet —
    hate crimes, booty calls, political
    assassinations.
    Who’s more Tybalt than the Blue Jay?
    More Mercutio than the mockingbird?
    That ibis pretending to be a lawn ornament
    makes a vain and stupid prince.
    Birds living in their city-states, flinging
    mob hits from the sky, they drop their dead
    half chewed at my gates. But give anything
    even one lice-riddled wing and suddenly
    we’re symbolic, in league with the adult
    collector of teddy bears, the best-addressed-
    in-therapy pinned like a kitty-cat calendar in
    every cubicle. Pathetic, really. With birds,
    make no exception.
    Alright. It’s possible
    I’ll give you this morning’s
    mourning doves, there on the telephone
    wire, apart from the hoi polloi—
    something in their pink, the exact shade
    of an aubade. And shouldn’t we recall
    that keen pheromonal terror, when dawn
    arrives too bright, too soon? Let’s hope we
    never muster what God put in the goose’s
    head. For this,
    you keep the doves.
    from The Normal School

LINDA BIERDS
----
On Reflection

    â€” Michael Faraday
    I will never contain the whole of it, he said,
    the mirror too small for the long-necked lamp
    floating swan-like near the angle of incidence.
    Never, he said, stepping back from the lectern
    and long-necked lamp, the mirror he held too small
    for the swan. To reflect the object entirely,
    he said, stepping back to the lectern,
    the glass must be half the source’s height.
    To reflect the object entirely—the lamp,
    or a swan, or my figure before you—
    the glass must be half the source’s height.
    Unlike thought, which easily triples the whole.
    My figure before you, the lamp’s swan,
    reflects