The Best American Poetry 2012 Read Online Free Page A

The Best American Poetry 2012
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cold
    running branches feeding down. It’s startling.
    But sense is startling, too. See how those boots
    flip skyward? Tongues lapping up dew on his
    mâché dandelions. This is Stevie’s dream
    miniacreage on the family’s old spread.
    He’s all spread out; he’s humming when he makes
    a working thing—he won’t let you inside.
    â€œSo,” he says. Today he’s stacked two propane
    tanks and ovens—two-burners—under a
    red maple, and when you open a door
    there’s mismatched silver and hatchets and things
    he’s made to eat and art with. Studio
    as wherever-you’re-itching-at-the-time:
    boards with big nails banged in and from the nails
    hang gourds, baby-sized cups speckled yellow
    (is that old egg?), a hundred kinds of who
    knows what, the center being where you are
    and are not. “I stay dry,” he says. “No bugs.”
    Says, “Why do walls want windows?” He’s put glass
    around his trees instead, head-high, to look
    at trees from outside out. One chair, sleeping bag
    â€”what he keeps inside the wild corn bin—
    plus a getaway, by which he means a tunnel.
    â€œOh oh,” he says, “they coming.” He can worm
    his way all the way to the apple trees,
    he trenched it out last fall, and lights the route
    with flashlights and tinfoil clipped to clothesline.
    That’s a trip. And that’s a curvy planter full
    of nursery nipples and hand-dipped Ken dolls.
    If you want to see an art made wholly
    in an outside mind, come see Stevie’s crib.
    That’s his ten-foot pink polyvinyl penis
    teeter-totter beside the birdcage
    for potatoes. “Take a ride,” he says. All eyes—.
    from The Southern Review

RICK BAROT

    Child Holding Potato

    When my sister got her diagnosis,
    I bought an airplane ticket
    but to another city, where I stared
    at paintings that seemed victorious
    in their relation to time:
    the beech from two hundred years ago,
    its trunk a palette of mud
    and gilt; the man with olive-black
    gloves, the sky behind him
    a glacier of blue light. In their calm
    landscapes, the saints. Still dripping
    the garden’s dew, the bouquets.
    Holding the rough gold orb
    of a potato, the Child cradled
    by the glowing Madonna. Then,
    the paintings I looked at the longest:
    the bowls of plums and peaches,
    the lemons, the pomegranates
    like red earths. In my mouth,
    the raw starch. In my mouth, the dirt.
    from Memorious

REGINALD DWAYNE BETTS

    At the End of Life, a Secret

    Everything measured. A man twists
    a tuft of your hair out for no reason
    other than you are naked before him
    and he is bored. Moments ago he was
    weighing your gallbladder, and then
    he was staring at the empty space where
    your lungs were. Even dead, we still say
    you are an organ donor, as if something
    other than taxes outlasts death. Your feet
    are regular feet. Two of them,
    and there is no mark to suggest you were
    an expert mathematician, that you were
    the first runner-up in debate championships,
    1956, Tapioca, Illinois. From the time your body
    was carted before him, to the time your
    dead body is being sent to the coffin,
    every pound is accounted for, except 22 grams.
    The man is a praying man & has figured
    what it means. He says this is the soul, finally,
    after the breath has gone. The soul: less than
    4,000 dollars’ worth of crack—22 grams—
    all that moves you through this world.
    from New England Review

FRANK BIDART

    Of His Bones Are Coral Made

    He still trolled books, films, gossip, his own
    past, searching not just for
    ideas that dissect the mountain that
    in his early old age he is almost convinced
    cannot be dissected:
    he searched for stories:
    stories the pattern of whose
    knot dimly traces the pattern of his own:
    what is intolerable in
    the world, which is to say
    intolerable in himself, ingested, digested:
    the stories that
    haunt each of us, for each of us
    rip open the mountain.
    *
    the
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