The 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology Read online

  only ones that were wide open.

  My Mother’s Lungs—began their

  dying sometime in the past. Doctors

  talked around tombstones. About the

  hedges near the tombstones, the font.

  The obituary writer said the obituary is

  the moment when someone becomes

  history. What if my mother never told

  me stories about the war or about her

  childhood? Does that mean none of

  it happened? No one sits next to my

  mother’s small rectangular tombstone,

  flush to the earth. The stone is meant

  to be read from above. What if I’m in

  space and can’t read it? Does that

  mean she didn’t die? She died at

  7:07 a.m. PST. It is three hours earlier

  in Hawaii. Does that mean in Hawaii

  she hasn’t died yet? But the plane

  ride to Hawaii is five hours long. This

  time gap can never be overcome. The

  difference is called grieving.

  Tears—died on August 3, 2016. Once

  we stopped at a Vons to pick up

  flowers and pinwheels on our way to

  the graveyard. It had been a year and

  death no longer glittered. My ten-year-

  old putting the flowers perfectly in the

  small narrow hole in front of the stone.

  How she somehow knew what the hole

  was for, that my mother wasn’t really on

  the other side. Suddenly, our sobbing.

  How many times have I looked into the

  sky for some kind of message, only to

  find content but no form. She ran back

  to the car. The way grief takes many

  forms, as tears or pinwheels. The way

  the word haystack never conjures up

  the same image twice. The way we

  assume all tears taste the same. The

  way our sadness is plural, but grief is

  singular.

  Appetite—died on March 16, 2015.

  Once, in graduate school, I was

  the only one to order a drink at the

  restaurant. My boyfriend did not like

  this. He dropped me off in the middle

  of town to walk home. I looked at

  the children’s clothing in the window,

  the little striped cap, pink dress, and

  thought about beauty. I spun around

  to avoid darkness but darkness was

  the one spinning me. I hid in a bright

  Taco Bell. The man at the register

  had a narrow hole for a mouth and a

  brown mass on his cheek. He was

  so beautiful that I thought he must be

  Death. Twenty years later, my mother

  requested Taco Bell for lunch. I ran out

  to buy her bags and bags of tacos. No

  one in line understood my emergency.

  The man I handed my credit card to

  had a brown mass on his face. He

  nodded when he handed me the bag,

  as if he knew. My mother pressed her

  lips to the tacos, as if she were kissing

  someone for the rapturous last time.

  Form—died on August 3, 2015. My

  children sleep with framed photos of my

  mother. Leaden, angular, metal frames.

  My ten-year-old puts her frame in the

  red velvet bag that held the cremation

  urn and brings it with her on vacation.

  A photo of my mother sits in the bag

  that once held a container of her ashes.

  When we die, we are represented by

  representations of representations,

  often in different forms. Memories

  too are representations of the dead.

  I go through corridors looking for the

  original but can’t find her. In Palm

  Springs, the desert fails me. Dust,

  sand, gravel, bits of dead things

  everywhere, a speck of someone

  else’s dead mother blows into my eye

  and I start crying again. The heat is

  now too optimistic. The pool and

  its luster like an inquisition. My own

  breathing, between the splashes and

  children laughing, no longer a miracle,

  but simple mathematics.

  Valzhyna Mort

  Music for the Dead and Resurrected

  “Here, history comes to an end / like a movie / with rolling credits of headstones,” writes Valzhyna Mort, though the history doesn’t end but takes deep and memorable residence in the music of these poems. The collection offers many different kinds of poetry: from elegies to protest poems to moments of lyric intimacy. But in all of them there’s an unmistakable emotion embodied in craft, one that continues to echo in our minds long after we finish the book. And this is perhaps the reason why Mort’s striking pages about Belarus are ultimately poems about all of us: they set our remembering and our grief to inimitable music.

  Genesis

  I’ve always preferred Cain.

  * * *

  His angry

  loneliness, his

  lack of mother’s

  love, his Christian

  sarcasm: “Am I

  my brother’s keeper?”

  asks his brother’s murderer.

  * * *

  Aren’t we indeed

  the keepers of our dead?

  * * *

  Let me start again:

  * * *

  I prefer apples that roll

  far from the tree.

  * * *

  Dry like a twig

  is umbilical cord, tucked between legs.

  * * *

  How did they cut it, Cain? With

  a stone?

  * * *

  Under Criminal Record

  write, “Mother, home.”

  Under Weapon

  write, “Mother, home.”

  Washday

  Amelia does her washing by the wall

  so bare you’d think she shaved it.

  * * *

  The window’s open, anyone can see.

  Soap hisses. An air-raid warning rings

  like a telephone from the future.

  Her dress is nailed to the laundry line.

  * * *

  From this gray garment, that is either guarding

  or attacking the house, three yards of darkness

  fall across the floorboards. She stands inside,

  as at the bottom of a river, her heart an octopus.

  * * *

  Her hands so big, next to them,

  her head is a small o

  (the neighbors squint),

  * * *

  stuffed hungrily with stubborn hair.

  New Year in Vishnyowka

  (A Lullaby)

  Snow glints and softens

  a pig’s slaughter.

  * * *

  Mama refuses another

  drink, mama

  agrees to another drink.

  * * *

  On the wall—a carpet with peonies,

  their purple mouths

  suck me into sleep.

  Small,

  I’ve been bedded.

  Toasts

  from across the wall,

  my lullabies.

  Mama says no-no-no

  to more drink.

  * * *

  My bed smells of valenky.

  Without taking its eyes off me

  a cat

  licks its gray paw as if sharpening a knife.

  Mama yells yes to another drink.

  * * *

  Mama’s breasts are
too big to fit into packed morning buses.

  There’s uncertainty

  I would grow into a real person.

  But on a certain day

  in Vishnyowka,

  a pig

  is slaughtered, mama whispers yes

  yes yes yes

  to more drink,

  I’m vanishing into the peonies’ throats,

  peonies smell of valenky,

  of pig’s blood

  on the snow.

  * * *

  * * *

  Clock’s hands leave a strange ski track.

  A Song for a Raised Voice and a Screwdriver

  Having climbed into my lap, the accordion

  composes

  its heavy breathing.

  Who

  turned Gregor Samsa

  into this black box? The old man

  * * *

  who taught me to play accordion banged

  a screwdriver on a school desk.

  For what?

  For a beat!

  * * *

  He wore thick glasses, with lenses yellowed like toenails.

  Ex-soldier, he had war medals and no rhythm.

  * * *

  Stepanych, you banged the accordion buttons

  like a man stuck in an elevator.

  * * *

  I limped

  across the keys

  following the promise of the screwdriver.

  * * *

  Listen to me now missing the beat as if dodging

  rubber bullets, Stepanych, I’m your student

  * * *

  to the bone. Stepanych, I’m

  a bone snatched

  by the giant spider

  of an accordion, stretching its leggy belts

  over my back.

  * * *

  “His strange heart beating next to mine” and yada yada.

  * * *

  I imagine you buried with that screwdriver

  like with a scepter—an emperor,

  Stepanych the Pitchless.

  * * *

  Your student places her accordion like an ancestral

  altar

  on an empty chair.

  * * *

  Children, we learned rhythm

  from the piss-stained hiccup of elevators,

  from the broken blinking of traffic lights.

  * * *

  I’m barricaded behind a sob.

  * * *

  Give me that screwdriver beat, Stepanych,

  and I’ll be off.

  Nocturne for a Moving Train

  The trees I’ve glimpsed from the window

  of a night train were

  the saddest trees.

  * * *

  They seemed about to speak,

  then—

  vanished like soldiers.

  * * *

  The hostess handed out starched linens for sleep.

  Passengers bent over small icons

  of sandwiches.

  * * *

  In a tall glass, a spoon mixed sugar into coffee

  banging its silver face against the facets.

  * * *

  The window reflected back a figure

  struggling with white sheets.

  * * *

  The posts with names of towns promised

  a possibility of words

  for what flew by.

  * * *

  In lit-up windows people seemed to move

  as if performing surgery on tables.

  * * *

  Chestnut parks sighed the sighs of creatures

  capable of speech.

  * * *

  Radiation, an etymology of soil

  * * *

  directed into the future, prepared

  a thesis on the new origins of old roots,

  on secret, disfiguring missions of misspellings,

  on the shocking betrayal of apples,

  on the uncompromised loyalty of cesium.

  * * *

  My childish voice, my hands, my feet—all my things that live

  on the edges of me—

  shhh now, the chestnut parks are about to speak.

  * * *

  But now they’ve vanished.

  * * *

  I was extracted from my apartment block,

  chained to the earth with iron playgrounds,

  where iron swings rose like oil wells,

  * * *

  I was extracted before I could dig a language

  out of air

  with my childish feet.

  * * *

  I was extracted by beaks—storks, cranes.

  * * *

  See the conductor punching out eyes

  of sleeping passengers.

  What is it about my face

  that turns it into a document,

  into a ticket stretched out by a neck?

  * * *

  Why does unfolding this starched bedding

  feel like

  skinning someone invisible?

  Why can’t the spoons, head-down in glasses, stop screaming?

  * * *

  Shhh . . .

  * * *

  The chestnuts are about to speak.

  Srikanth Reddy

  Underworld Lit

  Seldom does a poetry book question its limits as intriguingly and inventively as Underworld Lit. Seriousness and laughter, academic boredom and surreal tour de force, precision and playfulness, the living and the dead move unusually closely in this book. A multiverse, a few novels packed in one poetry collection, a delightful and ironic autobiography of a university professor of literature, a book full of disturbingly poetic moments and ironic quizzes, a guided tour to hell. Beautifully balanced and elegantly wild, this prose epic takes us where we truly belong — to the unknown. Reddy — like Dante — knows: If we want to say anything relevant about our world, we have to embark first on a profound tour of the underworld.

  V

  I promised my wife that I would call Dr. Song today. After put-

  ting Mira down for her nap and slipping outside for a smoke, I

  lifted the receiver. The sound it emitted, which I have heard with-­

  out pause countless times before, seemed to me otherworldly

  now, like somebody’s finger playing on the wet rim of a crystal

  bowl in a derelict theater before the wars.

  * * *

  It’s hard to say how long I stood there listening. It may have

  been seconds or seasons. The rings of Saturn kept turning in

  their groove. For reasons beyond me—our seminar had already

  moved on from late medieval Europe to developing world un-

  derworlds—I dialed 1-800-INFERNO, and before the first ring, a

  woman’s voice answered in heavily accented English.

  * * *

  “Is it you?”

  * * *

  “I think so,” I replied. Outside, the honey locusts sprinkled their

  pale spinning leaves in real time. Focusing on one as it fell

  seemed to slow the general descent.

  * * *

  “Oh creature, gracious and good,” the faraway lady recited, as if

  reading, against her will, from a prepared text, “traversing the

  dusky element to visit us / who stained the world with blood.” I

  could hear rain trickling in a gutter spout on the other end of

  the line.

  * * *

  “Please,” I said into the receiver, “remove my name from your

  list.”

  VI

  While outlining the requirements for our first critical essay of

  the term, I notice a h
and rising in world-historical time at the

  back of the classroom.

  * * *

  “What if I’m ideologically opposed to revision?” asks the red­-

  headed boy in a “New Slaves” T-shirt.

  * * *

  A city bus unloads its pageantry outside the window. A handful

  of sparrows erupts from the equestrian statue on the quad. I re-

  member Sun Tzu’s advice to humanities instructors, which I re-

  view on index cards at the outset of each academic quarter.

  * * *

  Hold out baits to entice the enemy. Feign disorder, and crush him.

  * * *

  “What exactly is your ideology?” I ask, stroking my beard.

  * * *

  “I’m a Zen Naxalite crypto-Objectivist,” replies my interlocutor.

  “How about you?”

  * * *

  I have no choice but to improvise. “Pro-recycling, anti-geno-