The Best American Poetry 2012 by David Lehman Page A

Beloit Poetry Journal

LAWRENCE JOSEPH

    So Where Are We?

    So where were we? The fiery
    avalanche headed right at us—falling,
    flailing bodies in mid-air—
    the neighborhood under thick gray powder—
    on every screen. I don’t know
    where you are, I don’t know what
    I’m going to do, I heard a man say;
    the man who had spoken was myself.
    What year? Which Southwest Asian war?
    Smoke from infants’ brains
    on fire from the phosphorus hours
    after they’re killed, killers
    reveling in the horror. The more obscene
    the better it works. The point
    at which a hundred thousand massacred
    is only a detail. Asset and credit bubbles
    about to burst. Too much consciousness
    of too much at once, a tangle of tenses
    and parallel thoughts, a series of feelings
    overlapping a sudden sensation
    felt and known, those chains of small facts
    repeated endlessly, in the depths
    of silent time. So where are we?
    My ear turns, like an animal’s. I listen.
    Like it or not, a digital you is out there.
    Half of that city’s buildings aren’t there.
    Who was there when something was, and a witness
    to it? The rich boy general conducts the Pakistani
    heroin trade on a satellite phone from his cave.
    On the top floor of the Federal Reserve
    in an office looking out onto Liberty
    at the South Tower’s onetime space,
    the Secretary of the Treasury concedes
    they got killed in terms of perceptions.
    Ten blocks away is the Church of the Transfiguration,
    in the back is a Byzantine Madonna—
    there is a God, a God who fits the drama
    in a very particular sense. What you said—
    the memory of a memory of a remembered
    memory, the color of a memory, violet and black.
    The lunar eclipse on the winter solstice,
    the moon a red and black and copper hue.
    The streets, the harbor, the light, the sky.
    The blue and cloudless intense and blue morning sky.
    from Granta

FADY JOUDAH

    Tenor

    To break with the past
    Or break it with the past
    The enormous car-packed
    Parking lot flashes like a frozen body
    Of water a paparazzi sea
    After take off
    And because the pigeons laid eggs and could fly
    Because the kittens could survive
    Under the rubble wrapped
    In shirts of the dead
    And the half-empty school benches
    Where each boy sits next
    To his absence and holds him
    In the space between two palms
    Pressed to a face—
    This world this hospice
    from Beloit Poetry Journal

JOY KATZ

    Death Is Something Entirely Else

    Department of Trance
    Department of Dream of Levitation
    Department of White Fathom
    Department of Winding
    Sometimes my son orders me lie down
    I like best when he orders me lie down  close your eyes.
    Department of Paper Laid Gently
    (Department of Sound of Sheets of Paper
    he covers me with)
    then sings
    I like best the smallest sounds he makes then
    Department of This Won’t Sting
    Am I slipping away
    Department of Violet Static
    as if he were a distant station?
    Department of Satellite
    My child says you sleep
    Department of Infinitely Flexible Web
    and covers my face with blankness
    Department of Tap-Tapping the Vein
    Department of Eyelash
    I can’t speak
    Â Â Â Â Â Â or even blink
    or the page laid over my face will fall
    Department of Clear Tape in Whorls and Double Helixes on the Wall
    He says mama don’t look
    Department of You Won’t Feel a Thing
    I cannot behold
    Department of Pinprick
    He will not behold
    Department of Veils and Chimes
    Lungs Afloat in Ether
    I like this best
    Department of Spider Vein
    when I am most like dead
    and being with him then, Department of Notes
    Struck from Thin Glasses Successively at Random
    I must explain to my child that sleep
    is not the same as dead
    Department of Borderlessness
    so that he may not be afraid of
    Department of Fingertips Lightly on Eyelids
    so I can lie and listen
    not holding not carrying not working
    Department of Becalmed     faint sound of him
    I am gone
    His song is the door back