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You Must Remember This

“Hauntingly fable-like and delightfully idiosyncratic.” —ADA LIMÓN

A woozy logic dominates these poems: a heart can become a buzzing hive of bees, a rooster can trigger a series of bombs, a young man can embrace a city bus as his spirit animal. Yet in this collection—selected by Kevin Prufer as the winner of the 2014 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry—Michael Bazzett slices through his poems with a dangerous sense of humor. “Your humor is deft and cutting / my fingers off one by one.” Once dismembered, Bazzett’s poems can re-member us and piece together the ways in which we once thought we knew ourselves, creating a new, strange sense of self.

A meditation on who we are, who we’ve been, and what we might become, Bazzett’s writing is like a note written in invisible ink: partially what we see on the page, but also the “many dozen doorways that we don’t walk through each day.” You Must Remember This is a consistently slippery, enrapturing collection of poems.

"1119897572"
You Must Remember This

“Hauntingly fable-like and delightfully idiosyncratic.” —ADA LIMÓN

A woozy logic dominates these poems: a heart can become a buzzing hive of bees, a rooster can trigger a series of bombs, a young man can embrace a city bus as his spirit animal. Yet in this collection—selected by Kevin Prufer as the winner of the 2014 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry—Michael Bazzett slices through his poems with a dangerous sense of humor. “Your humor is deft and cutting / my fingers off one by one.” Once dismembered, Bazzett’s poems can re-member us and piece together the ways in which we once thought we knew ourselves, creating a new, strange sense of self.

A meditation on who we are, who we’ve been, and what we might become, Bazzett’s writing is like a note written in invisible ink: partially what we see on the page, but also the “many dozen doorways that we don’t walk through each day.” You Must Remember This is a consistently slippery, enrapturing collection of poems.

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You Must Remember This

You Must Remember This

by Michael Bazzett
You Must Remember This

You Must Remember This

by Michael Bazzett

Overview

“Hauntingly fable-like and delightfully idiosyncratic.” —ADA LIMÓN

A woozy logic dominates these poems: a heart can become a buzzing hive of bees, a rooster can trigger a series of bombs, a young man can embrace a city bus as his spirit animal. Yet in this collection—selected by Kevin Prufer as the winner of the 2014 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry—Michael Bazzett slices through his poems with a dangerous sense of humor. “Your humor is deft and cutting / my fingers off one by one.” Once dismembered, Bazzett’s poems can re-member us and piece together the ways in which we once thought we knew ourselves, creating a new, strange sense of self.

A meditation on who we are, who we’ve been, and what we might become, Bazzett’s writing is like a note written in invisible ink: partially what we see on the page, but also the “many dozen doorways that we don’t walk through each day.” You Must Remember This is a consistently slippery, enrapturing collection of poems.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781571319302
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Publication date: 11/17/2014
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 96
File size: 307 KB

About the Author

Michael Bazzett’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, and Best New Poets. He is the author of two chapbooks of poetry and the winner of the Bechtel Prize from Teachers&Writers Collaborative. Michael lives in Minneapolis with his wife and two children. You Must Remember This is his debut full-length collection.

Read an Excerpt

You Must Remember This

Poems

By Michael Bazzett

Milkweed Editions

Copyright © 2014 Michael Bazzett
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-57131-474-1

CHAPTER 1

    In Vladivostok

    The woman in the dream
    said be careful with your cock

    and I suddenly knew
    in the way one knows in dreams

    that my cock had somehow become
    a lever that might detonate

    a string of bombs riddling the city
    in the way blood clots might lace

    a body in its final days.
    When I realized I was holding

    a rooster, I did not exactly
    know what to say. Perhaps

    I smiled. I don't know.
    There was no mirror

    and I've never been able
    to see myself in dreams.


    Cyclops

    The story is such a story we don't always stop to think
    about what it was like to be there: that cavern floor
    packed with pungent dung, dark as the inner bowels
    of an animal when that slab dropped into place: how

    utterly it sucked to hear the oaf stirring in his stupor
    made uneasy by wine mixing with the bolted flesh
    of good friends dispatched while we watched—
    it was just a flat-out bad deal for everyone involved.

    Polyphemus messed with no one: a law unto himself
    there in the hinterland eating goat cheese by the ton
    and Odysseus brimming full of the sauce of himself
    after out-clevering all Ilium by nestling in the stallion.

    He'd had plenty of time to think there in that hollow
    belly smelling of fear and fresh sawdust holding his
    piss in one endless clench counting droplets of sweat
    rivering cold over his ribs and under his breastplate.

    And now here he is again groping for his sharpened
    pole in pitch dark using one appetite to feed another.
    He lays the point in the drowsing embers and jostles
    it enough that the cave appears in a blood-warm glow.

    You probably know the rest—plunging the blackened
    tip through the eyelid, the crackling hiss as the eyeball
    burst, the geyser that shot from the socket—then huge
    hideous blind rage: it was easy to get inside, he thought,

    the real trick comes in the getting out: words that might
    land differently if you are not clinging to the fetid locks
    under a ram, knees pinning its rib cage, your hips held
    high as it drags you slowly into the chill morning air.

    Maybe then you'd feel the warmth of Polyphemus's
    wounded breath, washing across three thousand years
    as he crouches above you, stroking the woolly backbone,
    inquiring why this particular one lags so far behind?


    The Field Beyond the Wall

    We walk to the edge of town: there
    just beyond the wall we see clouds
    of crows and ravens, also buzzards
    teetering down to pick apart the flesh
    that peeks from every flapping shirttail.

    See that belly pale as risen dough?
    The dark oaks creak with the dead
    weight that hangs from their limbs—
    ropes taut with bodies barely turning.

    We gather on the wall, idly and in pairs,
    looking out across the charred fields
    and the smoking timbers of a farmhouse.

    By noon, the hum of flies will lull our ears
    into dreaming orchards thick with bees,
    but now in the chill of morning it is mostly
    the scrape and croak of birds just starting in.

    Someone has knotted an enemy banner
    to the tail of an ass to drag the muddy lanes.
    But the ass stands rooted in a ditch,
    shredding weeds with a ripping sound.

    Up on the wall, a woman works the crowd,
    making the rounds with a steaming sack of corn.
    People buy a roasted ear for warmth,
    holding it snug inside their hands for a long while
    before peeling back the damp husk.


    Memory

    It was not yet light.
    I heard my father stir.

    I crept downstairs
    in my pajamas to listen
    as he sent my brother
    to find his spirit animal:

    If it is a crow it is a crow,
    and you will not go hungry.

    I want it to be a bear
    or a wolf, my brother said.

    If it is a crow it is a crow,
    murmured my father.

    The door whuffed shut
    and cold ascended the stair.

    After a long moment
    I walked into the kitchen
    where my father sat.

    I want to seek mine, I said.

    Your what? he asked.

    My spirit animal, I said.

    He laughed and pointed
    to the broom closet.

    Check in there, he said.

    Maybe the mop bucket
    will be able to teach you
    how to hold your water.

    Very funny, I whispered.

    My father shrugged,
    What do you expect?
    You're a closet Slovakian,
    and your brother is simple.

    Last week at the library
    he checked out the phonebook.

    As my father spoke,
    I heard the staccato
    footfalls of my brother
    and his curious gait.

    The door burst open
    with a gust of cold:

    A bus! he said. Huge
    as the sperm whale!

    The mirror of my soul
    is a crosstown bus!

    My father smiled,
    Good for you, Jeffrey!

    His face was frank
    as an open sail. Then
    he looked at me and
    mouthed these words:

    The steam that blows the whistle
    never turns the wheel.

    Now that I am a man,
    I can clearly recall
    how snow sifted sideways
    through the air, how

    I never had a brother,
    how my father yearned
    to be elsewhere, how

    I longed to board that
    crosstown bus and sit
    quiet in the weak light,
    using a stubby pencil

    to draw the curious
    members of my new
    family, smiling there
    on those paper napkins.


(Continues...)
Excerpted from You Must Remember This by Michael Bazzett. Copyright © 2014 Michael Bazzett. Excerpted by permission of Milkweed Editions.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

After Machado 3

I

In Vladivostok 7

Cyclops 8

The Field Beyond the Wall 10

Memory 11

Soirée 14

When They Meet, They Can't Help It 15

Clockwatcher 17

Atlas 18

The Difficulty of Holding Time 20

The Same Bones 21

Some Party 23

The Building 25

The Sinclair Gift Emporium 30

Rather Than Read Another Word 32

The Last Expedition 33

Holder Strand 35

II

Oil and Ash 39

Look, he said, and pointed 40

Aria 42

from A Natural History of Silence 43

Unspoken 46

From Chaos 47

What Might 49

September Picnic 51

Interrogation 53

Lions 54

A Woman Stands in a Field 56

The Crisis 57

Elpenor 58

Look, Overlook 59

III

The Dark Thing 63

The Book of ___ 64

Nuns 66

The Shop Across the Street 67

The People Who Came Afterward 68

The Professional 69

Imperfection 71

The Horse 72

Now Here, Nowhere 73

In the Pasture Corner 75

How It Survived for a While 76

The School 77

The Orangutan 78

Manhood 79

Foretold 81

Binary 82

Recollection 84

The Last Time I Saw God 86

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Related Subjects

Poetry
American Poetry
21st Century American Poetry
American poetry->21st century
Poetry
American Poetry
21st Century American Poetry
American poetry->21st century

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