The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2013 Read online

Best American Anti-War Poetry Inspired by Kurt Vonnegut

  FROM So It Goes

  So It Goes is an annual literary journal founded by the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library, a nonprofit organization based in Indianapolis, Vonnegut’s hometown. The journal prints newly published work alongside older, republished material. What follows are a few poems from their inaugural issue, "War and Peace.”

  Someone Warm, You Know Him

  a friend of mine

  a very gentle man

  with laughing light blue eyes

  we’re at a bar

  and he starts talking

  tells me about Viet Nam

  how he enlisted

  so he wouldn’t have to go there

  went anyway

  and became a star

  the man who could shoot dimes

  high in the air

  automatically without thinking

  the man who would shoot anything moving

  clay bushes men

  children

  his eyes are laughing again

  as he tells me

  it took him six years

  to break the reflex

  now he can sometimes miss

  when something moves in the woods

  —Katharyn Howd Machan

  “A soldier lives . . . ”

  A soldier lives a soldier dies

  a military chaplain sighs

  a flag is folded someone cries

  a general tells the truth or lies

  a politician simplifies

  a voice vote echoes only ayes

  reporters ask for hows and whys

  a spokesman has to improvise

  some doctrine somehow still applies

  negotiators compromise

  or don’t as one more soldier dies.

  —Robert West

  Simon Pokagon and the Farmer

  In the 1870s, a well-educated Indian came to Lake County about twice each year to visit the graves of his ancestors.

  —Kankakee Valley Historical Society

  From the way he squinted

  I knew that farmer had no iota

  of what to make of me—

  a savage in a tailored suit

  who quoted Shakespeare and Tecumseh,

  spoke Potawatomi and Greek.

  Near juniper, I prayed

  for those who cradled me. I spoke

  to steady their steps down slick ravines.

  I sang that their days

  might be pleasant among heaven’s

  herds of buffalo and elk.

  One April, I found the mounded

  graves plowed under, shin bones

  stacked with fieldstones. I could have

  splashed the kerosene of a curse

  but, instead, turned to offer

  my grief, a treeless prairie

  without periphery. Those bones

  could be mine or his.

  My tribe’s revered flower—

  the trailing arbutus—

  belongs to all who observe

  its delicate white blossoms

  on bended knee.

  As my gaze caught his,

  the farmer could only clear

  his throat as if pushing

  away dried leaves.

  —Shari Wagner

  Soldier on a Plane

  The flight was overbooked,

  the jet-belly packed tight

  with tourists hurrying home,

  travelers dreading home,

  wanderers without a home

  peacefully lost and content.

  I found myself sitting by a

  young soldier no more than twenty.

  He was so quiet, looked so sad.

  I suppose he had been on liberty,

  and now, fresh from kisses goodbye,

  he was going back to his unit.

  He smiled at my hello,

  then drifted into sleep,

  his leg nestled against mine.

  We flew that way for hours,

  his leg always touching mine.

  If I moved, he moved,

  as if begging in his dreams

  for the simple gift of human touch.

  There was nothing sexual,

  just a need for contact

  with the mundane.

  I remember when my grandmother was dying.

  She lay in her bed touching things,

  her gown, her sheets, her face and hair.

  The doctor said he had seen this a lot,

  it was common with the dying,

  as if they knew life was ending

  and they wanted to touch everything

  just one last time.

  —Jim Wise

  Best American Consumer Report

  EDW LYNCH

  FROM yelpingwithcormac.tumblr.com

  EDW Lynch is a San Francisco comedian and, according to his website, the world’s first “corporate manglomerate.” Lynch claims to have provided security for the Easter Bunny and brokered a historic treaty between kittens and puppies. What follows are a series of Yelp reviews in which Lynch impersonates acclaimed author Cormac McCarthy. Lynch’s work can be found at edwlynch.com.

  Red Lobster

  Wichita, KS

  Cormac M. | Author | Lost in the chaparral, NM

  Two stars.

  The manager sat tied to the chair in the corral, firelit on all sides by the torches of the townfolk. Dean stood next to him with a Colt army revolver pointed to the hardpacked earth. Who else will speak, he said.

  A chorus of voices rose at once. From the din a miner hollered: The shrimp was rubberlike.

  I believe Pastor Macabee already done spoke to that, said Dean. He looked around him. Ghastly amber faces staring back like funeral masks. Are there any other charges, he said.

  A prostitute in dusty finery stepped forward. She spoke haltingly. I made a reservation for six persons. And we still had to wait 45 minutes to set down. Her face fell into her hands and she began weeping softly. We was on time, she said.

  A drunk cowboy carrying a rusting hatchet lurched toward the manager. I’ll tickle his neck with my axe so help me, he said.

  Dean leveled the big revolver at the cowboy. The man regarded him wetly and melted back into the crowd. Dean spoke loudly so that all could hear. We will do this orderly or by God I’ll send him to the capitol and to hell with the lot of you.

  A little girl strode forward into the light and looked up at Dean and the manager with eyes shining and obsidian. Hang them, she said. Hang them both.

  Chipotle Mexican Grill

  SOMA - San Francisco, CA

  Cormac M. | Author | Lost in the chaparral, NM

  Three stars.

  See that false burrito. See it swaddled in tinfoil on the desk in the bowels of that great tower, a bundle of meat and sauce in a place long ago ceded to silicone and copper. The stooped man eating that peasant food as if in consuming it he can escape to a farmfield in a verdant valley and look down and see blood running from his blisters and say, yes this is work. This is work. Instead his hands are clawlike and ruined by the keyboard and the mouse for he is a thing of bone and sinew in a sprawling contraption electric and of man’s creation but not of man at all. And were he to saw his breast open with that plastic knife and soak the carpet black with his hot blood and were he to look ceilingward like some stigmatic enraptured and with the bellows of his lungs let forth a soaring wail in that subbasement his screams would be swallowed by the acoustic panels and repulsed by the good steel door as if he had made no sound and spilled no blood at all.

  American Apparel

  Haight Ashbury - San Francisco, CA

  Cormac M. | Author | Lost in the chaparral, NM

  Three stars.

  Ballard sawed his brocklefaced mount around and faced the line of raiders. A stinking host clad in patchwork tunics of brightest cotton. As if their carnival colors could mask the blackness of their nature. For they rode as men of their kind have ridden for millenia on
wasted steppes and beggared plains skylit by a dustveiled sun their implements glinting and in their hearts a hunger sated in blood.

  Come on boys, Ballard said. Let’s lay into these deadeyed hippites. Give no quarter but mind the cotton. Buffalo Exchange won’t accept no sullied merchandise.

  And from their number arose a cry ancient and of another world entire and the raiders spurred their mounts through the paneglass of the American Apparel and the souls within perished under the blade and the cudgel and their cotton hides were taken from them.

  Urban Outfitters

  Union Square - San Francisco, CA

  Cormac M. | Author | Lost in the chaparral, NM

  Three stars.

  And they come there in great numbers shuffling into that mausoleum that was built for them like some monument to the slow death of their world and among those tokens and talismans of that faded empire they forage like scavengers their faces frozen in a rictus of worldweary their clothes preworn in some tropical factory and they shop and they hunt with dullbrown eyes through that cavalcade of false trinkets and those shrinkwrapped mockeries laying there in silent indictment and they reach out to touch those trite things and their faces are slack but in their gullets a scream lies stillborn for they are the kings and the queens reigning over the death of their people and the world is not theirs and never was and the suffering and the horrors are not their doing but the work of their bankrupt forbears and before them stretches an abyss beyond man’s imagining and within their lifetime the promise of a coming reckoning measured in blood and in pestilence and they shuffle through that store near paralytic and finally they take a metal thing with a feather on it and they buy that thing.

  Best American Advertisement for a Home Security System

  TIM WIRKUS

  FROM Subtropics

  Subtropics is the literary journal of the University of Florida. The following short story by Tim Wirkus was published in issue 14. Wirkus’s writing has also appeared in Gargoyle, Cream City Review, Sou’wester and Ruminate Magazine.

  An Intrusion

  This is what Mike Mitchell told me when I ran into him about a month ago. He said they found the first envelope after a weekend away visiting Julie’s dying grandfather. It was pinned up on the wall above their TV, so when they sat down to watch the news that evening, after unpacking and grabbing a bite to eat, they couldn’t miss it.

  They had been living there about four months by that point, their first real house, bought with money from their first real jobs out of college—Mike working as a project manager for a company that developed accounting software, and Julie writing copy for a small advertising firm. Unfortunately, the advertising firm had folded unexpectedly a month after Julie had started there, and she was without a job. She and Mike were doing OK, though, making their house payments, with enough money left over for groceries and other essentials. Things were just a little tight.

  Anyway, they got home from visiting Julie’s grandfather, who had always been more like a father to her and was currently very, very ill, to find an envelope pinned above their TV. Mike noticed it first and asked Julie why she had pinned an envelope to their wall. Julie said she hadn’t. Mike asked who else would have done it. They were the only ones with keys to the house. They didn’t even have a spare key hidden outside yet; it was just one of those things they kept meaning to do.

  Julie pulled the envelope down from the wall. Inside she found a dozen or so photographs. Mike looked over her shoulder as she flipped through them. The pictures showed a young couple engaged in a series of mundane domestic pursuits—standing together at a sink washing dishes, reading on a couch, playing cards at a dining room table, changing a light bulb in a floor lamp. The problem was that the couple—who were not Mike and Julie—were doing all these things inside Mike and Julie’s house.

  Mike grabbed the pictures from Julie and flipped through them again. None of the photographs revealed the face of either the man or the woman. In each picture, their backs were to the camera, or their heads were turned, or some object obscured their faces.

  Mike called the police. They showed up quickly and were not very helpful. The police asked if anything was missing from the house. Nothing was missing, as far as Mike and Julie could tell. The police then asked if the pictures could have been taken before they moved in. Julie pointed out that the couch the couple was shown sitting on was Mike and Julie’s couch, that the framed prints on the wall were Mike and Julie’s framed prints, that the dishes in the couple’s hands were Mike and Julie’s dishes. The police asked who else had keys to the house. Mike said that nobody did. The police asked if the couple in the pictures resembled any friends or acquaintances of theirs, or if they knew anybody who was especially fond of pranks. Mike said no. The police said that they were sorry, but there wasn’t much they could do. They told Mike and Julie to change the locks on their house and let them know if this happened again.

  So Mike and Julie changed the locks on their doors and tried not to think about the strangers who had been inside their house. At work, Mike’s team got a big new project from a prominent local gym that was unhappy with its current accounting software. At home, Julie searched for a new job, calling old acquaintances for leads, redesigning her résumé for the hundredth time, writing cover letters, scanning the classifieds section of the newspaper, and waiting for prospective employers to get back to her.

  I stopped Mike at this point and asked him how they could just go about their lives like that. Didn’t their house feel too weird to them? How could they sleep there? Mike shrugged. He said the pictures were upsetting, but what else could they do? He and Julie were a little jumpy for a week or two, but then they pretty much stopped thinking about it—it’s surprising what you can get used to.

  He went on with his story.

  A few months later, they found some more pictures. Just three of them this time, in an envelope again, sitting on their dining room table. Julie had an interview that morning for a receptionist’s position at a dentist’s office—not ideal, but better than nothing—and found the envelope when she sat down to eat breakfast. The pictures showed the same faceless couple as before, the man tall and thin with pale, freckled skin, the woman shorter, nearly as thin as the man, with faded blond hair that reached halfway down her back.

  While the previous set of pictures depicted scenes that, had they not been taking place in Mike and Julie’s house, might be mistaken for innocent snapshots of the happy domestic life of a young, married couple, this second set of photos had an air of menace about it. In a picture taken in the living room, the couple seemed, at first glance, to be embracing. On closer inspection, however, something about the twisting posture of the woman and the tense, veiny grip of the man’s arms suggested, respectively, resistance and restraint. The second photograph, taken from just behind the man, showed the woman leaning over, almost into, the kitchen sink, her hair pulled back from her face, which was turned away from the camera. The man watched from the doorway, hands on his hips. In the third picture, the husband lay face down in Mike and Julie’s unmade bed, the sheets tangled and askew, while the woman knelt on the floor a few feet away, her face held in her hands.

  The police were even less helpful this second time. They suggested that Mike and Julie install alarms in their house, or move. They said the relatively small magnitude of the crime didn’t merit the kind of constant police surveillance it would require to find the perpetrators.

  As they were leaving, one of the officers pulled Mike aside. The officer said that if this was a prank, it had gone far enough, and that Mike should stop trying to frighten his wife. Mike said he had nothing to do with any of it. The officer said that was fine, but if he did, it needed to stop.

  At this point in his telling, Mike paused.

  “So was that the end of it?” I asked.

  “No,” said Mike. “No.”

  It was just one picture the third time, in an envelope pinned to the sleeve of Mike’s coat when he took it dow
n from the rack in the corner to run to the store to pick up a head of lettuce for a salad that Julie was making. This was just a few weeks after the second set of pictures had turned up. Mike unpinned the envelope from the sleeve of his coat and handed the photo to Julie in the kitchen. She set down the knife with the bits of sliced radish clinging to it and held the picture with both hands.