Free The Best American Poetry 2014 by David Lehman Page B

leaves.
    Inside a story’s spell,
    you find your way back,
    where a stone on a path waits
    for you to stumble.
    Like the kaleidoscope’s contents,
    time is jumbled, opening at will.
    Now: a too-bright sun and you,
    teetering on a wall,
    parasol clutched tight as you tumble.
    This parasol is, for a moment,
    everything you’ve lost
    and all that can console.
    from The Southern Review

MARTY M C CONNELL
----
vivisection (you’re going to break my heart)

    the frog ready for inspection, skin flaps
    opened and pinned back, organs
    arrayed for the taking—this is how
    I approach you. and you. here, my spleen
    for the squeezing. my intestine
    to be strung out, perhaps wrapped
    around the neck like a lariat. not
    for the squeamish, my heart thudding
    to be plucked out with a delicate thumb
    and forefinger, dinner for the willing,
    and beautiful, and broken. I am not smart
    about love, is what I’m saying. not even
    smart about whose face I will take
    in my hands and press against my face
    until we are a single organism. the mouth
    is not an organ but I give it to you
    anyway, I give it all away is what
    I’m saying. I’m easy to adore. my torso
    a life raft strung with Christmas lights
    and full of all your favorite things, beer
    and expensive cheese and songs
    about leaving. I’m so beautiful
    splayed out on this tray full of tar
    and entrails. I’m so useful
    I could be a meal for an army
    of traumatized surgeons, I’m full-time
    at this job of bleeding, my esophagus
    a stripper pole or cocaine straw.
    when I say eat me I mean
    suck the bones clean, leave nothing
    for the waiting, nothing for the vultures
    or the travelers to come.
    from The Carolina Quarterly

VALZHYNA MORT
----
Sylt I

    Lie still, he says.
    Like a dog on the beach
    he starts digging
    until the hole fills up with water.
    He has already dug out two thighs of sand
    when she finally asks, what’s there,
    convinced there’s nothing.
    There’s nowhere he can kiss her where she hasn’t already been kissed by the sun.
    Every evening she goes to the ocean with her three sisters and their old father.
    They strip in a row,
    their bodies identical as in a paper garland.
    Bodies that make you think of women constantly chopping vegetables
    â€”it is like living by the train station,
    their father swears—
    and always putting the last slice into their mouths.
    For her, there is not even a knife left in the whole house.
    The sound of a cuckoo limps across the dunes.
    She takes a beam of sunlight sharpened side by side with stones
    and cuts with it
    and you can tell her vegetables from the others’
    by how they burn.
    By now they already stand wrapped in cocoons of white towels,
    her teeth, crossed out by a blue line of lips, chatter,
    scratching the grains of salt. Her bitten tongue
    bleeds out into the mouth a red oyster,
    which she gulps, breathless.
    Their father turns away to dry his cock,
    but the girls rub their breasts and crotches openly,
    their hands skilled at wiping tables,
    their heads as big as the shadow of the early moon,
    their nipples as big as the shadows of their heads,
    and black so that their milk might look even whiter.
    She, too, is rough and indifferent toward her full breasts,
    as if she were brushing a cat off the chair
    for her old father to sit down.
    They drink beer in the northern light that illuminates nothing but itself.
    Sailboats slip off their white sarafans
    baring their scrawny necks and shoulders,
    and line up holding on to the pier as if it were a dance bar.
    It bothers her, what did he find there after all?
    So she touches herself under the towel.
    It is easy to find where he has been digging—
    the dug-up spot is still soft.
    The water is flat like fur licked down by a clean animal.
    A bird, big even from afar,
    believes the ocean is its egg.
    So the bird sits on the ocean patiently
    and feels it kick slightly now and then.
    from New Letters

HARRYETTE