Free The Best American Poetry 2014 by David Lehman Page A

I’m so drunk brown,
    I’m just ignoring the noise rising up from streets asleep
    brown? As in, as brown as dead leaves because my love’s
    eyes were dead brown and when he shouted down at
    that drunk on the street that New Year’s Eve from
    my third floor window that drunk man called him
    Whiskey Whore Boy. And his eyes were not wish-
    wash blue, his eyes were mostly moss and trees,
    not mojitos in a barroom, no, his eyes all gin-lit in
    a hotel room on our last night were ice-cold, even
    in his farewell he was bold, his eyes anyone might
    have called plain, but they could at least cry. I am
    sick to death of your blue eyes, fabric eyes, flower
    eyes. I have brown eyes, plain and saying eyes behind
    thick frames, glassy eyes handing themselves over
    to you in buckets eyes, dig your hands into my black
    soil eyes, my ugly eyes reaching into your eyes for
    my twin eyes, look back at me eyes while your eyes
    crawl the walls, cloud-blue, wandering off as milky
    bosomed maids will look away from the eyes that
    seek the crevices deep between their heavy breasts
    that sway beneath the cows they bend to milk eyes.
    Won’t you have another drink from my silty yonder
    eyes? I may look
    plain but I’ve got
    roses in my blood,
    can bloom right
    out the soil of these
    here brackish eyes,
    wander a limb across
    the chest of your
    country, unlock
    the footlocker of your
    desire with the tip
    of my vine eyes.
    from Willow Springs

JAMAAL MAY
----
Masticated Light

    In a waiting room at the Kresge Eye Center
    my fingers trace the outline of folded money
    and I know the two hundred fifty dollars there
    is made up of two hundred forty-five I can’t afford to spend
    but will spend on a calm voice that can explain
    how I can be repaired. Instead, the words legally blind
    and nothing can be done mean I’ll spend
    the rest of the week closing an eye to the world,
    watching how easily this becomes that.
    The lampposts lining the walk home
    are the thinnest spears I’ve ever seen, a row of trash cans
    becomes discarded war drums, and teeth
    in the mouth of an oncoming truck
    want to tear through me. Some of me
    always wants to be swallowed.
    â€¢â€¢
    The last thing my doctor said before I lost
    my insurance was to see a vision specialist
    about the way light struggles and bends
    through my deformed cornea.
    Before the exam I never closed my right eye
    and watched the world become a melting watercolor
    with the left. Before a doctor shot light
    into the twitching thing, before I realized
    how little light I could handle, I never
    thought much of the boy who clawed up at me
    from beneath my punches, how a fingernail scraped
    the eye, or how it closed shut
    like a door to a room I could never leave.
    â€¢â€¢
    I could see the reflective mesh of his shoes,
    the liquor bottle tossed in an arc
    even before it shattered at my feet, and I am embarrassed
    at how sharp my eyes were, how deft my body,
    my limbs closing the distance—how easily
    I owned his face, its fear, and fought back tears—
    all of it mine. I don’t want to remember the eyes
    that glanced over shoulder just before
    I dragged him like a gazelle into the grass
    that was a stretch of gravel and glass
    outside a liquor store. How easily this becomes that.
    â€¢â€¢
    On a suspension bridge I close my bad eye
    and it’s like aiming through a gunsight;
    even the good eye is only as good as whatever glass
    an optometrist can shape. I watch sundown
    become a mouth. Broad and black-throated,
    it devours the skyline and every reflection.
    Horns sprout from the head of my silhouette
    rippling dark, dark, dark against the haze of water
    and I try to squint that monster
    into the shape of a man.
    from Ploughshares

SHARA M C CALLUM
----
Parasol

    You could still become a queen.
    When, a slip of a girl,
    you directed trees
    to lower their limbs,
    neither fire ants nor sap
    could stop your climb,
    nor rain that lightly fell,
    misting