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

        crown of infrared
        song of drifting dune

Then one day she noticed the forest had started to bleed into her waking life.

There were curved metal plates on the trees to see around corners.

your lionskin
overcoat

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…