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      Thank you. We hope you enjoy these poems.

       This e-book edition was created through a special grant provided by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation. Copper Canyon Press would like to thank Constellation Digital Services for their partnership in making this e-book possible.

      This book is for Adam Boles and Jude Countryman—

      After this deluge

      I wish to see the dove

      saved,

      nothing but the dove.

      I would drown in this sea

      if it did not fly away,

      if it did not return with the leaf

      in the final hour.

      “Nach dieser Sintflut,” Ingeborg Bachmann

      Contents

        Title Page

        Note to Reader

        Ars Poetica for the Future

      *

      1  Someone Asks, What Makes This Poem American?

      2  Love Is Not an Emergency

      3  The Body Is a Big Sagacity

      4  I Growed No Potatoes To Write About, Sir

      5  When at a Certain Party in NYC

      6  H. Res. 21-1: Proposing the Ban of Push-Up Bras, Etc.

      7  How We Count in the South

      *

      1  12-Step

      2  Perfect

      3  Burying It

      4  Olentangy River

      5  Fathers Never Answer

      6  Victoria Station

      7  Time Machine

      8  The Problem of the Domestic

      9  Energy Policy

      *

      1  With Birds

      2  “A Rottenness Begins in His Conduct”

      3  Poem of Philosophical and Parental Conundrums Written in an Election Year

      4  Love Letter: Final Visitation

      5  Field

      6  Après Moi

        Notes

        Also by Erin Belieu

        Acknowledgments

        Copyright

        Special Thanks

      ARS POETICA FOR THE FUTURE

      The Rapture came

      and went without incident,

      but I put off folding my laundry,

      just in case.

      Also, from my inbox this morning,

      subject header:

      “Lesbian Torture Camps.”

      The mind ricochets like a fly—

      is there anything left for people

      to do to people?

      Meanwhile, my boyfriend

      looks forward to the apocalypse

      as a retirement party

      he pretends he won’t be

      attending, like the characters

      in the movie who climb the highest

      building, wanting to be the first

      to welcome the spaceship.

      In this world,

      I’ve given up sleep for dreaming

      and art is still our only flying car,

      but I can’t recall when anticipation

      became the substitute for hope.

      Recently, C. said, “Now we begin

      the poems of our Great Middle Period.”

      I imagine digging a series of small

      holes, burying poems in Ziploc

      baggies. I imagine them as baby teeth

      knocked from the present’s mouth.

SOMEONE ASKS, WHAT MAKES THIS POEM AMERICAN?

      And I answer by driving around, which seems

      to me the most American of activities, up there

      with waving the incendiary dandelion of sparklers

      or eating potato salad with green specks of relish,

      the German kind, salad of immigrants, of all

      the strange, pickled things we carry

      over from other places, like we did on Easter

      mornings

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