The Best American Poetry 2013

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the middle
    of a prairie, but they’re as awkward as he is
    elegant compared to the world around him.
    And, if you still don’t get it, imagine
    a chain gang with perfect pitch
    singing Cole Porter’s “I Get a Kick Out of You,”
    to their overseer, whose frustration swells so
    for an “authentic-nigger work song,”
    he and his crew demonstrate their darkest
    desires and break into song themselves,
    â€œCamptown Ladies Come Out Tonight,
    Doo Dah, Doo Dah,” kicking up their heels
    in the dirt, tasting an old slave
    trick on their tongues, each syllable
    falling from their lips like a boll
    of cotton. Funny, to the naked eye,
    but consider the Native American
    who speaks Yiddish, appearing out of the dust
    of the Old West, reminding us
    of how we learn to comfort ourselves
    by making ourselves a little uncomfortable
    over time in the fossil of race.
    Jump cut: Black Bart, our hero, enters
    town where danger awaits
    him, our hero who we hope
    to see beat up bad guys
    and win the woman, even when
    the hero is black and the woman,
    Lili von Shtupp, is German. “One false move
    and the nigger gets it.” Yes, self-sacrifice
    with his gun to his own head, but
    the unwitting white liberals save him
    from himself, which is their life’s mission.
    You see, what’s so funny about racists,
    is that they never get the joke, because
    the joke always carries a bit of truth.
    Notice how we can laugh only when we recognize
    a Sambo of our own design, by communal hands—
    in our own likeness, a likeness we own—
    so we can laugh at the absurd pain of it all.
    This joke, like an aloe released on a wound,
    like a black man trying to do a job
    in a town in which he’s not wanted,
    like a black man unzipping his pants
    in the Old West to a white woman in a hotel
    room in the center of this town. Did I mention
    how he was released from a chain gang?
    Did I mention how she was an exotic dancer
    who slept with men for money, helping them
    hang their insecurities on a hook
    on the back of a hotel-room door before entering?
    Careful with your laughter; one false move and
    Nigger here gets appropriated. That’s not funny
    to you? Well, when they saw themselves
    on screen in their comedy-drama romance,
    in the darkness of the theater, they laughed.
    And they needed to see it; it had to project
    on the wide screen to get a good cathartic laugh
    from the tragedy of the 20th century.
    And it’s okay to laugh at these ironies
    today because they’re blown from a wind
    of past pain, with the velocity of memory.
    You see, when the Jewish artist has suffered
    enough he knows he can strike back
    with just a stroke of laughter: A black man shtupping
    a German floozy, who tries to ensnare him
    between her legs, but gets hoisted by her own
    garter petard? Well, that’s just some funny scheiße.
    Now, please, excuse all this humor
    wrapped in truth—or, is it a chiasmus of this?
    Whether you’re ready or not, stand back, please,
    and back away from all those stereotypes
    restricting you from stereotypes you
    aspire toward. As you deny self
    through elective surgery on your nose or lips,
    excuse me, please, as I rear back in laughter;
    and excuse me as I recall the 1970s
    and remember myself laughing, laughing
    blue-black gut bursting songs of truth. Yeah,
    please excuse me folks as I whip this out.
    from The Virginia Quarterly Review

LAWRENCE JOSEPH
Syria

    Â . . . and when, then, the imagination is transmogrified
    in circles of hatred, circles of vengeance
    and killing, of stealing and deceit? Behind
    the global imperia is the interrogation cell. It’s not
    a good story. Neither the Red Crescent
    nor journalists are permitted entry, the women tell
    how men and boys are separated, taken in buses
    and never seen again, tanks in the streets
    with machine guns with no shells in the barrels
    because the army fears that those who will use them
    might defect. Who knows what

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