Free The Best American Poetry 2015 by David Lehman Page B

out of a building.
    I mean the confetti
    a boy can’t stop smiling about,
    and no his smile isn’t much
    like a skeleton at all. And no
    their neighborhood is not like a war zone.
    I am trying to say
    the neighborhood is as tattered
    and feathered as anything else,
    as shadow pierced by sun
    and light parted
    by shadow-dance as anything else,
    but they won’t stop saying
    how lovely the ruins,
    how ruined the lovely
    children must be in your birdless city.
    from Poetry

LAURA M C CULLOUGH
----
There Were Only Dandelions

    And the boy.
    Everywhere, sound. Here: sirens. There: sirens.
    And the crying
    [because one woman’s husband
    doesn’t love her anymore
    and wants to go to medical school,
    now, after so many years of lawyering;
    because another one woke up one day,
    told her husband, I don’t think I ever want
    to sleep with you again , meaning sex,
    and then he learned it meant not
    even the sleeping, the spooned, belly loose
    intimacy of howler monkey night;
    because the dandelion blew
    into a million parachuting seeds.]:
    Pre-dandelions floating everywhere, to every continent.
    There, too, screaming, just like sirens,
    and everywhere in between, each anniversary of the living.
    My boy is in college now , one says,
    but that day of the bombing,
    when they called, I stopped at the 7–11
    to buy bags to bring the body parts home in .
    He was one of only four that survived .
    [Whose baby, anonymous, in the trash heap
    Whose boys aiming, aiming, falling in love
    with the fear they won’t ever outrun?
    Whose child that one,
    without an arm, a knife in the other?]
    They’re not all white faces, and this poem
    is not a public poem.
    Not all poems are meant to entertain,
    like Jericho said, named
    after that city by that river
    in the hot place so many people
    have lived in, so many hostages
    been taken in, so many,
    so many—whose offices I can’t name or know—
    no, not entertain, but sing just the same,
    a polyphony of song
    birds in the morning,
    snow geese aflight, guns rocketing,
    barrel out, sound through
    the beating blood,
    bleating animals, beseeching
    all those river gods
    for some respite from this suffering.
    [Each a lawn weed having grown
    up in some crevice,
    against the wall of each life,
    flowering heads all in all
    and each in one, this explosion
    on the seed-headed planet,
    fractal imagining, and this
    is my imagining, this declaimed I ]
    Though some of you—
    even though this is not a public poem—
    will say the I is dead; there is no self;
    no things but in ideas
    dead, yet no ideas in things either;
    and then the accumulation
    of linguistic artifacts heats up like a
    like a like a
    lava lamp.
    [All Spencer’s Gifts’ glow and thrift store chic.]
    And you will not be warmed by it,
    but who is this you ?
    Because if there is no I ,
    there can be no we ,
    and I am not willing to surrender to that.
    [to no us-ness , to you not being
    one sole being on the other end
    of this this-ness , but only part
    of some conglomerate, corporate
    entity called nothing-we-can-comprehend.
    I am unwilling;
    I am a dissenter.
    I am .]
    Which renders the corporation something
    more than they ,
    which is almost always paralytic or amoral,
    certainly unsympathetic and unsympathizable,
    something  approaching  evil.
    Just you.  And me.  Please.
    First, I claim this I , that only has this
    language(s), technology(s), space,
    time, sex, gender, religion
    or lack thereof,
    sensibility,    sense,
    a body, a body in time,
    in sex, in faith and betrayal
    and reason and reasoning:
    out of this great unsynthesized manifold,
    all penetration and penetrating.
    [Like a seed head blown apart,
    all pollination and flowering
    and dried and falling away
    and lifting and airborne and borne
    away from each other to land
    and germinate and survive
    in the meagerness of conditions,
    the little dying, the little survivals.]
    An image, Williams said; an