Laurin Jefferson

Americana

Mother, I know your kitchen’s nothing like mine,
with its flawless faucet and its limeguarded sink.
With a wingnut in my fist, I stumble
into the kitchen, it’s telling me something, I think:
hatchling, she says, the sun swallowing itself, I can’t see. . . .

Telepathy

Devin Johnston

memories. I lay in a perambulator.
six to nine months. On my right were two horses—
 the brown one was staring at me
 very intently

The Tragic Drama of Joy

Mary Ruefle

Late that night it rained so hard the world
seemed flattened for good.
But the grocer knew the earth had a big gut
and could hold more than enough.

Operative Truth

Tory Dent

Unfortunately, my love for you continues on like a pilot light.
I hate the relief its status as a survival mechanism provides.
I hate the flicker of interest despite my prescient sense of your failing
the way I would listen to an inaugural address.

Kissinger at Peace

Ben Miller

NYRR, 5:43 pm, blond scrams into my car, suede purse swinging, reception suit askew, badminton bracelet rattling like a second set of teeth. Upsets the computer programmer with the cage on his lap containing the calikitty going to the North Shore Animal League for repairs but not me. Not this Kissinger. I live for the third rail.

What’s American About Form?

Frank Bidart, Rafael Campo, Marilyn Hacker, Ann Lauterbach

Frank Bidart: Modernism in English poetry was the creation of Americans, and Pound was the central figure in this. You know his famous assertions: “Make it new,” “Literature is news that stays news.” Even in that very famous and influential essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot talks about an ideal order made by all the works of art of the past, and that to enter that order you have to do something that’s new. The premise is that to make a poem that truly joins those works that constitute what people understand as the heritage of literature, you have to be new.