was it that / that glance / backward

downward / so evidently / an afterthought   

the body / enacting / its relentless

For instance, this lushly verdant plain. Imagine it dialed back to featurelessness, each spiraling stalk retracted, each filigree rosette slow-blinking shut.

as if         you were ever wide-eyed enough to believe in urban legends
as if         these plot elements weren’t the stalest of clichés: the secret lab, the 
        anaerobic chamber, the gloved hand ex machina, the chemical-
        infused fog

 

couldn’t stop / himself picking 
his red / lest it
pinken lest / it pale 

 

how can I
ask you to
absolve me

To spectate
is a verb
that does not

1.

hyperarticulated giant black ants endlessly boiling out of a heaped-up hole
in the sand

A gauze bandage wraps the land 
and is unwound, stained orange with sulfites. 

                  crown of infrared
                  song of drifting dune
The smooth-boled trees of his interior

Monica Youn reads a poem by Lorca about New York amid a disaster.

On “Goldacre,” a poem in our new Summer issue.I wrote “Goldacre”—my “Twinkie” poem—in the wake of the brouhaha surrounding last year’s Best American Poetry anthology, when the white writer Michael Derrick Hudson published a poem under the name Yi-Fen…