The Best American Poetry 2013 by David Lehman

give to their captain as a Christmas present—I mean my description—because the captain, well, he loved that tree and he loved my writing and every one of the cops hoped to be promoted in the captain’s heart and, who knows, maybe get a raise. Still, after all that sitting around in the courtyard eating sandwich halves, I had a nice feeling of sharing, so when they asked me if I had anything else to say I told them that in the beginning you understand the world but not yourself, and when you finally understand yourself you no longer understand the world. They seemed satisfied with that. Cops, they’re all so young.
    from Ecotone and Harper’s

MAUREEN SEATON
Chelsea/Suicide

    for Joe
    In every myth there’s a secret. Like the time I was looking for my childhood around the next bend after Newark and missed it, or the time teeth were discovered in my favorite uncle’s yard and he disclaimed ownership and sang falsettos.
    I went to a meeting on 28th Street. The guy next to me had eyes exactly like yours, corpuscles hardening inside blue irises. He stood too close when he told me I would die if I didn’t ease up on myself. I thought he was right but I wanted him to step back so I didn’t have to see inside his liver, which was sodden, like mine, and dark with tinges of red, white, and rosé.
    He talked to himself in the middle of the room, the way he would talk to anyone who used hyperbole. He said: I tried suicide but it didn’t work. When he stuck out his hand I shook it.
    I walked with him down 8th and we parted at 21st. I thought of all the times I’d dozed in my car near the river, how cops would come to my window and tap, telling me it wasn’t safe for a woman alone in the middle of the day in a car near the river in a world like this one. I’m sober, I’d say, pointlessly.
    Now there’s snow in Chelsea and my soul leaps in something I’ve heard described as bliss. You’re never far, I realize, and here is the secret: If you’d lived you’d be asleep now beside me, bent around me like an aura, keeping me safer than I ever thought I had the right to be.
    from Columbia Poetry Review

TIM SEIBLES
Sotto Voce: Othello, Unplugged

    Iago, it was not Desdemona but myself
    I loved too much. So many battles found me
    unharmed, but the want of beauty struck
    like a kind of death. My rank only served
    to wound my head with bigger dreams.
    Didn’t I deserve better than the tricks
    every season brings? All my years
    had stumbled into shadow: my own
    dark face, harder and harder to find
    in this cold kingdom. You knew my soul
    ached for a woman who could conduct
    my blood—that I might be in love alive
    with the sharp sublime flinting
    her eyes. All mine! My heart nearly
    doubled     until you made me doubt—
    not so much Desdemona as my own
    worthiness: if what I was couldn’t make love
    faithful     I thought better to be done with
    her     than to know myself a smaller man.
    from Alaska Quarterly Review

VIJAY SESHADRI
Trailing Clouds of Glory

    Even though I’m an immigrant,
    the angel with the flaming sword seems fine with me.
    He unhooks the velvet rope. He ushers me into the club.
    Some activity in the mosh pit, a banquet here, a panhandler there,
    a gray curtain drawn down over the infinitely curving lunette,
    Jupiter in its crescent phase, huge,
    a vista of a waterfall, with a rainbow in the spray,
    a few desultory orgies, a billboard
    of the snub-nosed electric car of the future—
    the inside is exactly the same as the outside,
    down to the m.c. in the yellow spats.
    So why the angel with the flaming sword
    bringing in the sheep and waving away the goats,
    and the men with the binoculars,
    elbows resting on the roll bars of jeeps,
    peering into the desert? There is a border,
    but it is not fixed, it wavers, it shimmies, it rises
    and plunges into the unimaginable seventh