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Poetry Tuesday

The Margins’ Poetry Tuesday section highlights poems by emerging and established Asian and Asian diasporic poets with a mission to celebrate the personal and the political. Poetry Editor Emily Jungmin Yoon and Assistant Poetry Editor Ayesha Raees select poems that are published in The Margins every Tuesday. Submissions are open in May and from November through December.

You lived in this body and
ripped the wallpaper out.

“Anetra Aubade” and “Hardly Creatures”

“Singing into Soil” and “Chaplin”

I had loved, fathered, and given up 
on my dreams in this otherness

I, like you, came to Earth
unexpectedly.

She makes the most beautiful cakes with her hands, my mother. They’re never too sweet.

When I look, the ocean roars.

If men are the first to leave, why do families still beg their gods to have sons?

Today, the sky greets me awake.

i watch you watch the news, that a body/ prepared for burial is measured at the elbows, and/ worry.

“I was invited to a dinner” and “Sagrada Família”

My love: a knife blessing flesh. My Lord, there is no end, only more beginnings.

So my father summoned my mother, my sister, my history professor, and my psychiatrist who demanded my weightless crown for their curiosities.

“Two Stories About Drowning” & “Self-Portrait as a Dead Dog”

Come to the dinner table without the day’s baggage. Eat with a smile on your face.

Say something ordinary. Repeat it until it no longer sounds ordinary.

“if it is violence that turns boys into               men,/
it must be love that turns them into                   fathers”

I’d rather be a glimpse than a girl. Good. I’ll rest here for now.

I feel every hot girl word deep in my/ bones, because in life, I’m most attracted/ to people who show power without raising/ their voices.

She was named / for her village / for the apricot blossoms / for the sweet waters of the lake / for her petal earlobes / for her mother’s scent

What does the doom scroll say?

I am a woman in the same way my grandmother is a woman and Ma is a woman. That is to say, we were etymologically forced into it.

ARAB AMERICAN scowls. bares teeth. bares/ ARAB TEETH.

You wanted to talk about big / concepts like love as though they’re worth anything.

In Japanese, chizu is the word for map. In a sentence:/ Nihon no chizu wa arimasu ka?

The story gets its sweetness from the detail of catastrophe

Skin too is a passport. 

Treasure, treasury, / treachery.

That my country always expects me to audition for my life, / I accepted as fact.

I miss tea eggs from the convenience store: / a vat of liquid, warm pebble in hand.

These women / discarding clothing   discarding accoutrements   discarding [    ]   discarding

to dream of a red-crested / cardinal inside some kind of henhouse.

Where there is need / there is devotion.

Walking in the predawn, syncopal / heat we revert to the guttural old / tongue.

All you need for fortune is just a roof over your head

In a day, we’d hope to / be more alive.

The memories of springs and summers blend, fade, / like lyrics, movie scenes, people I never really knew.

In my right hand, a monsoon to rain the year away / In my left, a poem to wash yourself clean.

It was not my choosing / to be my grandma’s living heirloom.

Fear had carried my life, / and I was still afraid.

The estimate comes down to six hundred missing,/ the estimate comes to a son flying off a bridge.

i am re-writing / his life. no debts. no fights.

The garden rustling / while it blazed

I wish / I could disinherit this grief

it’s mango season and i don’t know how to act

An East Asian nematode is threatening the European eel population

have you heard the word about all / our past lives?

When I imagined the worst, the storm always passed. 

You want me to tell you something about my life.

each discover no matter where they go / they bring their world with them

You settle into the ease of not leaving.

“But what to do? All good things must come to an end.”

Instead, eternal life / blossoms on the branches of a peach tree every three thousand years.

did he want to sing me away like i was a ghost

She grips a cup so hard it breaks and the heads  / rise all at once, “She’s here!”

My mother: first in this hypothetical line, / claws already reaching out for the taste of first light.

I’m talking to her at night, / the earliest hour of her death.

I don’t trust this reservoir of feeling

Once my eyes close, they watch / her calcium peeling piece by piece.

To remember you / Looking back at me from many places.

Which language will you make your moon and which your earth?

“Poem of Beginnings” and “The Sarah Poems”

The soul advances, the soul is trampling the universe.

Inside the rice bowl are a few /
unshatterable stones 

India’s Covid-19 lockdown was ordered in four phases.

“The Buddha Tries to Withdraw Money During the Revolution” and “On Being Absent for the Revolution”

“To Hold Hands Again” and “When My Songs are Over, I Lose My Grip”

At night, I whisper the word for woman, then other, repeat again.

We are not rich, neither are we poor.

“@nature, i avoid you,” “my life newly painted is well,” and “@nature, teach me things”

Still, I am begging to be forgiven for the love / of my life

I too wander the temple of knowing.

In the first days, everything beckons / you.

For you, I sing the same songs and read the same obit.

I touch my tongue to bitter starlight

“Good morning. Happy Birthday of your favorite Ganesh. Love. Good Day.” and “Please don’t forget about your flu shot.”

Of my heart, / my eyes. I stole your bifocals and we crashed into /
the kitchen table and all you could see was sunlight.

An erasure of the Punjab Protection of Women against Violence Act 2016

Together we are the best pretenders.

Sometimes they / Also kill ants

say desire, say cinder, say Pulau Pinang, my home

Only thought the smell of jasmine tasted like smoke.

“Silence” and “Contending with ‘You’ After You Are Gone”

I have done it again, crossing / outside the frame into / some brave, new world

“Anthill,” “Jericho,” and “Tofino”

we dig / holes into the ground, fill them with dirt / from another shore, call it home.

a ghazal crown

An image is a seizure of likeness

After immigration interviews on Angel Island

Imagine that, an America with no hills.

I exhale & I let go of a jagged myth, // a small blade.

Instead of sorries, offers of ice cream
swirl between our barely open doors.

How lovely my mouth feels when tasting these words

We watch heat lightning clamor against clouds

You can rest assured that I am as real as they come

to gaze is to say everything in my east is east

If there’s anything / that still surprises me / it’s the fact joy too has weight.

He dreams of drowning, / dreams of dancing.

I try asymptotically to get back to you—

Once, I was not a watcher but out in the electric blue

I make soup and burn / incense to invite wisdom into my home

Sometimes, I choose a night that doubts and a rain / that overcomes.

What is the / true opposite of human?

There was no difference where I went.

I secretly know I’d be a great flight attendant.

And is this tenderness? Professional palms kneading my bare, / jittery skin?

Halmoni told me to never put a knife to my face. / I like to imagine she thought I was beautiful

once there was a book where a man
raised the dead. / his followers ate the body.

“Reencarnación | Reincarnation” and “La sombra de la vaca | The Cow’s Shadow”

You’re sleeping so soundly it feels like a sin every time I move.

Put it to the dirt: / lullabies, hair, memories, / nails, superstition.

But the question brushes off his shoulders and I realize /
he’s not going to forgive me

Her ambient expression / in strangled lace.

There is no rush to continue / existing but I miss you / like an early page.

On a dewing street I stood bare and pinned by desire.

A bridge has landed on my doorstep & a paper is asking me to leave / behind what isn’t mine.

I’m not apologizing / when I offer my head to the leash // of your hands

In the gentle pull of the first light, / we hobble to stand our bodies / ours and wanting

I emerged a tether / -less, violent hiss // of becoming, staring winter / straight in the mouth.

But a summer that begins must end. / Soon, the rains are called.

Drink it all, / dredge the bottom for sunk honey

The other night my love turned his body to mine. This life, he said, is my heaven. 

Q: Why the impulse to traverse old habits? / A: I believe in the refusal to explain.

after 9/11 / cold silver stretches / across a slate gray table / a room tucked in an airport terminal / you’ve never heard of.

Today because you are a Cancer rising I want you / to try keeping my name in your mouth like a freeway-Slurpee / kiss, to feel my name burst against your body like / the airbag’s inflated plastic cushion while the car careens in / figure-8’s

What else, if anything, would I / outdare a bullet for, if not our country / to bury our grandparents in?

I read the flora and fauna in my home as uncannily resilient. / My ancestors’ bodies were presciently small. / Nests accommodate the needs of infestation. / I simply could not live in this house alone.

in Chinese, pistachios are called / kaixinguo — happiness fruits. / but they are neither happy nor fruit. / they are birthed out of their shells / i am not happiness nor fruit nor mother; / only carefully extracted.

once, / before the stars & stripes, / we traced stripes across / the stars to steer us / home.

[we/ ] bombed them, because [ /they] bombed us.
a star falls on someone else’s city because it’s just a shooting star.

機遇到來 / 我失去 / 垂手 | An occasion arises / and I lose / an entire world

When baba worked for the Oil Co. they allotted him / a farm house

shuffling their feet toward the family, idling by / the lip of a suddenly crowded room

Put in ear buds to bloom elsewhere. / Elsewhere, I am already a father.

In every dream, I consider coming clean / through my skin like a shadow, every bare bloodline / unedited & untouched

I stand before you, though, O Allah, the daughter // to Abraham’s father. Here is my sacrifice: / hold him close, as You did with Ismael.

Listen, we can stay here forever, in Tucson, / rain is a fable and we don’t need / a story to fall asleep.

I’m not proud of what I’ve done. One foot bent in the gaze of the lake as if pleading to be consumed immediately.

REPEAT: you stay up memorizing all the twists and turns of a ‘proper’ / enunciation and still your tongue fails you the morning after, syllables / flopping in your mouth like a dead fish, cleaved in shame.

I would never have to shed my skin / in my leaving.

Anahita’s head weighs 10 kilograms. Her hand, extended forward yet / disconnected from the bust, holds a fragment of drapery.

And who could forget / when he declared he was going to marry himself, /showing up to Barnes and Noble in a wedding dress

The cypress that grows up straight / sweetly represents my beloved’s the stature. / How can I compare his stature to a cypress? / The cypress is sweetly stuck in the mud of astonishment.

lord, please gift me that same wonder. / to pause hunger for a larger suspension

At the door, like a dog. / I waited for love. / The heart / was a station / where evenings stopped.

A golden teardrop in the making. The skin stretched pale and translucent, leaving the flesh to its own devices in an increasingly dangerous season. The fruit will not travel far.

stories that seethe in the blood: a lion / that slumbers in the copper pillar of her / body.

My country is broken, / Mountains and rivers remain / In the city, grasses / Spread their roots

Where did you abandon the snowflake on which I wrote my secrets?

how much time / does the wind give us? / do we still run? / who sends the wind? / does it carry the bombs? / or do they come after?

A girl labelled comfort / wartime ammunition / recalled her father who built / her home on / a graveyard

i want to banish the shame/ write it in a book to be banned,/ take the banal, grow a banana/ tree of new knowing

tell me you knew all along & you reached for / the heavens because you were happy.

Gas station glow past 3AM, the glassed look of a man who’s been sitting for too long, hot dogs slumbering behind a screen, their skins plump and pink.

shall god taste / the sick / bodies also / singing / also breaking

When I look back, I think about all the times Gatorade has let me down in my life.

It’s funny how ppl were saying that the peaches in Parasite / were some serious motif & symbolism of prosperity’s toxicity

I stow away the sentences in which there is no you in my drawer right after writing them I remember the time when I emptied the bottom of my drawer for you There I found stuff like a key that became useless forever

Left home at sixteen, said you wanted to go see the West. Grandpa didn’t stop / you. Figured you might die in some jungle across the Pacific.

i love you / too much / let us reason in dissonance / play mozart on mondays / barefoot & / the wisteria i grow wild / the hands i keep sharp—

One day you’ll be married. May Allah make your naseeb good. May you find a man who prays and follows the deen.

somewhere a tiger loosens its throat or so she imagines / the rubber trees looming she lifts her paring knife to the day’s throat

They say / the faithful go to God with the love // of a child, they say the soul sees everything / without eyes. I am trying to understand // my life.

Back then I was committed to the color blue, felt moved to paint my walls, nails, furniture the same shade of teal. Now my body swells at the window with casual longing.

At birth, my mother recites my ba zi / to a monk, and like all good daughters, // I do not ask. How can a mother / help but lead her daughter // Astray?

Or Say: a piece of rope at the top of the stairs where shame broke even and shame blame and victim bad-name got it’s nasty plug.

Our Lady of Scapulars, we carry you around / like credentials, like disgrace, we suffer
this insufferable heat and your packaged spirit’s / smothered by the reek of our sweat—how much closer / must we be?

He says that every winter was a cheap metal spoon// bent backward in a steaming pile of rice. So much of what he says is practice // for another language.

everything is/air/is/argument (the chorus said)/as I slept/in the desert//
service on the cell went dead/I said/jocasta always hangs herself

At fifteen Nani shot a / tiger. A big gun in a girl’s hands; I’ve seen the picture.

My family has legends in the form of a spider’s legs.

When my harabeoji died / last spring I thought I’d move to California, convert / to Catholicism, kneel beside my halmeoni at early Mass // become student of those hundred and three / Korean saints though I can’t name more than one.

In our home we brewed ginseng tea to battle unnamed / diseases. We held hands with health. I was never good at it, of course: / always too bitter, oversteeped. Always the universe mocking me / from the sidelines.

On the screen, an old man is dying in his bed. / The adults are talking / loudly, two feet away from each other. / From their voices, I can tell their hatred / for that old man, a thin blanket to his chin.

Perhaps for you a minefield’s / just a field, for you a mother tongue / is not some rune that breaks your mouth / and heart.

She waned in the neighborhood of my first love, like some sounds that turn mute in/another language.

Your knuckles are furred like my father’s, / balling his socks one inside the other / and tossing them on the bed.

When the children / correctly used their chopsticks to pick up the rolled eggs and / separated the kimchi without splinters, they knew they were / loved by their food. The ashes knew it too.

What tense do we belong in? I prolong a period / into a comma. I want to revive we’s we’ve archived. / I would let Time drown like a sparrow in a lake

What a terrible song, this hoofed wind. / What a terrible song, the begging of my body. / I am the knife. I am the knife. I am the knife.

After the rain, the June wind / wheedles the airy curtains / and creeps into the ward

i say “i don’t need a man” and it’s true/ but flowers. the flowers how i love the flowers / before they drown inside out / from their own perfume.

脱脂牛奶 …..………………. $1.00 / mama am i skeleton enough mama am i skeleton enough .………. 0.25 mile

What is the legacy of the People’s Republic of China?

I reenter my body as a highway, then a Monday, then a demo / of a pop song that never made it to the surface.

In a guest laden living room to the side in a corner, / I tried to wear a coat like skin, // And in that moment, that precise moment, / I’m asked, “Are you Tibetan?”

the manner / in which the oaks nod to me it’s funny / I swear there are no magnets / lining my boots / maybe just a few nickels

Don’t you know my face? Didn’t you / break it open? Being beautiful, it’s no crime.

America swallowed my parents / spit out skeletons / Waleed became Bill / the Clintons stretched / their skinny vowels / over my father’s father’s father’s name

My friend uses words I know: / desert, rainfall, homeland. Speaks with / dead wet sea eyes of a house where her / grandfather found peace.

Unearth the map of storied constellations. / Vibe the unknown. Wager that fear is not our common dialect.

my eyes are closed / & i won’t lose my temper, want a world where my people aren’t background, refuse / to be an extra in someone else’s weekend again.

I grow up: I never learn / Chinese: I never go to China: we eat until our stomachs peached: we grow peaches on trees and they are moneyed: we bury / their hearts in the dirt: fullness is 貴 is: priceless:

치마를 까뒤집던 꽃들이 / 태양의 먼 어깨 위로 투신한다 / 나무들이 입던 속옷을 벗어 깃발처럼 흔드는 정원에서

I dress devotedly. I devote my time to smoothing the knots in my hair. / I lace rum and cokes with devotion. My aloe vera plant sings devotion.

& if / you find yourself full of holes, the / way they beat fish at the markets, / think of the hands, damp & cherried / with rain, that once tore your mother / out of the house / she learned to dance in.

Robert Frost
By Jose Padua

I loved them all and everything / they thought about so much and I was out / of my mind by then, not with grief or disgust / but with beauty

I am thinking / Of a burnt cathedral, which / Has nothing to do with actual death.

her story—a bone-white line across her throat. / Given enough time, she says, are all stories / not ghost stories?

By Megan Sungyoon

we dog eating people / eating off each other / bear the vaguely dog / sounding name stairs

Is not house, not kitchen, not ceiling. Spanish chandeliers as old and intricate as iron.

I am // just trying to sleep. To feed. To fill / myself and grow larger from it.

What / saint-kissed relics shall I take with me, what shall serve as capstones for the / humble churches I’ll build in the parking lots of the American dream?

O whose chant do I hear in these halls recalling my deeds, or my debts, the structure / of the cancer room, a storm that once wiped Laos clean of sin a thousand years ago?

[how i got that ]
By Jake Vermaas

the / tangibility of absence: to put a ruined keep inside of someone / until it becomes skin

When I tell you that she’s a witch, I’m not saying like it’s a bad thing. What I / mean is that one time she went to see / someone and said that he was going to die and then he died / the Friday after.

Gilded & Majestic: New Writing from Three Nepantla Poets
By Ally Ang, Jan-Henry Gray, and Madiha Khan

no matter how desperately the world begs / for my blood / I still refuse to die. in this body, survival / is an outlier

But tonight, the horses, there, / down among the beeches, know when I begin to yield / and do not move until I do, turning their heads / in the direction of my voice.

Writing Home
By Surabhi Balachander

You can describe a place / without knowing it. / At recess in March I choked / because the air tasted like fertilizer. / What’s the difference / between breathing a place / and being suffocated by it?

I pulled the comforters out after. / You had sweat the bed; the room bloomed with / your sweetness. I thought / you can know / somebody for a long while and not know / their scent.

I was the writer in my life / and where did it get me / is not a line from an Army manual

inheritance: Two Poems by Xiao Yue Shan
By Xiao Yue Shan (单小月)

hong kong a neon neckline, long hair glittering / with ship-lights, crystal balls, storm velvets. / it’s her life, yet I had come, and grown / my hair, and happened upon the eastern sun / like a moon.

Sengarone Peter Vetsmany: Two Poems
By Sengarone Peter Vetsmany

Now, I’m lost in the woods thinking of Noy. / Is she still in Seattle? Does she has her pastry shop? / In Minnesota, I gather what is gone, capturing a spirit.

i had a twin who was 95% water. a twin who latched its mouth onto my heart and drank me dry.

Non-Invasive
By Cameron Quan Louie

Instinctively, one / wants to be the native plant in its ancestral loam, / one wants a resistance to the sun, to shun full rainfall / for a flash of morning dew, or at very least, grow / some throwaway limbs.

How to Make an Ariel
By Jai Hamid Bashir

I practiced my Urdu in the bathroom with you / as I sat in the tub; only so long before an American / mermaid can stand without floating on into sea foam.

I could become / a better citizen, but then who would be left to / speak for me?

three Novembers ago we found a comic that told us / if you want to say thank you, don’t say sorry. / I have held my breath ever since.

Fast Food
By Kara Kai Wang

What do you like he tries again / and I think of landscape, the early fog / ridden hills of San Francisco when eucalyptus / unfurl like children waking to the light.

The shaman wore long white sleeves rippling & / Minuscule in the bone-dry distance. / I jerked & righted the wheel / Plying invisible waves of hot sea

I write myself into the fiction / whether you see me or not.

Table
By You Li

If you lie / on the table, you subject the table to a terrible guilt. / It is no longer a table people can eat on. If you stand / next to the table, the table senses its mortality.

A Spider
By Souvankham Thammavongsa

Over and over / from some small / dark pit, / it spun out / a whole world / for itself

Out With Mom
By Rebecca Pinwei Tseng

I am careful with my words unless they are not in English, / am I not? (不好意識打擾各位可是我不想再禮貌了。) / My mother is careful with her words only when they are in English.

Here, the mangled text that will / become a poem — loose language — / blueprint for a reckoning.

My father was always the magician, / not I. One swift pull and / the silk streamers would spill / from his mouth, flooding the floor.

My father the frycook, his father / the same. Their hands so oiled / everything they touched / flamed. Like Midas if Midas / loved fire not gold.

Did you take my mother’s hand or ghost / the altar in her bedroom first?

Always / propelling the thing forward, not leaving us to rest. / Below: the infinite world, // all its ligaments, all its creatures.

A Window
By Bernard Capinpin

The / day you died, the windows of our house were / open to let the breeze in. You said that it was / nothing.

“L’Heure Vert”
By Monica Ferrell

Near the bottom of your hollow mouth, / Your cut tongue gathers lizard scales / Like a sunken bucket in an algal well.

Photograph Curling
By Aldrin Valdez

She’s here to see us off. / Her voice is the softest ligature, unthreading. / Why are you saying goodbye to everyone except for me who raised you?

There was a longing / in the carvings of the / knife my mother held / against the fruit. She / peels with quiet / permission.

Generation
By Ahmed Bouanani, translated by Emma Ramadan

May our dead no longer speak to us / Our language now kneaded into other woes / with rancid stars a meager pittance / and false kingdoms rich in violent blows

I always thought I’d find you / throned in the moon-drenched water my wonder / woman your palms curled upward like lotus skins

Who’s keeping count of what’s given against what’s stolen? / There’s nothing I can’t trace back to my coarse immigrant blood.

Tonight, when you return, you / will be an American and I will still be a girl who needs / a translator to read in my mother’s language, my mouth full / of so few shapes. I fall into the habits of my mother, it’s true.

Immigrant’s Lament
By Phuong T. Vuong

This is my small sphere. / I’ll make good, stay folded in myself. I promise / to memorize the bramble and texture of garden walls.

She is girl. She is gravel. She is grabbed. She is grabbed like handfuls of gravel.

Cherrystone, For Us
By Andrea Juele

Fingers caked with wet / rice break backs and bellies, / pluck gills, / scrape eggs, tear limbs / Tita takes our legs– / cracks them / under a glass jar for us. / We suck shells ’til twilight.

Woman who puts up her hair comb holds / up the sky. There is the legend and probably a lie.

From a crevice in a severed rock / birds with long beaks were tearing out earthworms. / My pain was without a wound / and in the bodies of the frayed, torn-out worms / there was no pain.

because I love you, I will gut this distance / with nostalgia, because grief can taste of sugar if you run / your tongue along the right edge

Poets write back to the literature of Partition on its 71st anniversary

Rainbow
By Eileen Chong

Not all rainbow: here, tender orange, / there, rusted brown, the underside / gelatinous and white. Then the bones.

There is uncertainty in your future, a woman on the street told me. I can see it. You will be very unhappy, very soon.

Minoru
By Michael Prior

The stallion: one win short / of the triple crown. My intonation: / one stress too many for an apology— / all the times I got it wrong. Minoru, / Minoru—both are gone.

i say i’ll be / dressless, skinless, curated / and pickled. i say i’ll give it / all up for a chance to be warm.

Mythologies have their way of explaining the basic human condition: that there will always be some where or thing you wish to get to or back to.

Swallow
By Geramee Hensley

Ask if he knows, what the first champagne mango of the summer / tastes like, its golden juices flowing over some farmer’s / cigar paper skin.

Apo
By Cornell Pineda

A policeman found the boy minutes later. A shaman, / a monk, a priest, and a poet are still pouring over / his soul.

Against the hills, a tall building with plank-walled rooms. / I, wishing for my wife and son like clouds far away, / My night is even longer under the bright moon.

The moon appears / the small clip of a nail a paring knife / a chalk mark / left to linger in the sky

We prayed for resurrections, / but the dead remain as memories that / seemed to shrink in the mind, / like an airplane appearing smaller / the further it gets from the ground.

A Beautiful Child
By Omar Sakr

I should say kholo, my mother’s brother. / I should say umja, my father’s brother / so you know which branch of the tree to cut. Or / cherish.

Litany for the Long Moment
By Mary-Kim Arnold

If I can learn its grammar and alphabet / hold its vocabulary in my mouth / then perhaps I can know something of history—my history.

Face | Off
By Su Hwang

Pipedream: / I wondered what it would be like to strip away / slit eyes—sick of assimilation; the debilitating / task of tireless reinvention.

When I was born, my parents put me on a rug on the ground and stood / staring at me until the light outside dimmed and then there in the / darkening we three were quiet for a while

I could live like this, I thought, lie here / and have my own kind of drifting blue.

I dream my mother / unravels / hair out of my mouth / in English / she asks me / to speak Chinese / coils the hair / into a dark gloss / whorled / in her palm

One lover was bold and touched / me once behind a door, but it was her cousin / Vandie, the one who never looked at me, that I loved. // One lover was kind, so kind, in kissing / me at all.

Older immigrants talk as if Reagan invited them to dinner. / The dream never showed, but we can paint chain link white.

Hiding Skin
By Hazem Fahmy

Studio Era music makes me want to dress fancy and pretty; leave the house in gorgeous armor, but I know too well the earth’s hunger and I will not satisfy it. Today I leave my house and I make sure no one can call me faggot.

I remember / 亲爱的 / back then / how you robed / yourself in tall grass / & earthed your flesh / how your waiting / shrunk soldiers’ bayonets

‘What I / am—I’ve gone further than gambling, drug addiction, death— / I’ve killed the image of her daughter.’

All Over the Place
By Hazem Fahmy

‘A week before I graduate, I round up all my femme clothes / and stuff them in the Savers plastic bag / I’d gotten them in.’

So blonde
By Leah Silvieus

‘Mine: thick & black, so coarse / when trimmed, the ends splintered / bare feet.’

‘Which poem can defeat / the fear of dying / a meaningless death / and how to write that poem / staring into the barrel?’

‘As if I could get un-situated / this airport a bubble hovering / in a void between celestial bodies / in but not of / the country I stand in.’

There are countless ways / to justify company. Hunger, overdue balance, whatever. / Cartoon savage licking the throne clean. / & isn’t that what you always wanted? / To be filled & emptied?

Document
By Bao Phi

In all the books I love, the hero doesn’t strike first. But then again, none of the heroes look like me.

ASEAN at 50: Poems from Across Southeast Asia
By The Transpacific Literary Project

Half a century on, what does it mean to be part of ASEAN?

Azalea Azalea
By Aria Aber

For eleven / years I lied about where I’m from, / ashamed by the music of endings, // that deep hollow bell. How much of my yearly / tax is spent to bomb the dirt / that birthed me?, is a question // I never wanted to consider.

‘Children are playing soldier. / Fetuses ripped from wombs dangle / in nearby trees. Yet he opened his mouth / and a flood of love melodies poured out.’

pink spam injected into the bloodstream / won’t make one minnesotan, / the difference of an exporter and importer, / colonizer and the colonized with a nine digit ssn

Every spring, a deer must shed antlers used for fighting and each bone branch grows back with the thought of my partner’s return this season, and yet.

where are we headed
By Jess Rizkallah

but this is boring. let’s talk / about something else. people are only lines / written with water it’s not that serious. i just want to drink / my coffee. i just want to think about roses i misheard / the words as a laugh, beautiful like a song of roses

Dear Dogwood Bloomed
By Michelle Lin

I meant / to just take a photo of you. Forgive // my trespasses, my negatives, / but remember them. My ghosts // were asked to lay in their bed, / and so said: I am not like them // I am not. This is the blood I’ll leave / behind on bark to bark.

At this point I will disobey and say / you are free to go if you choose. Choice is a complicated part of describing / Palestinian heroes or terrorists.

In a Roman Story
By Mia Kang

Oh Mars, you mistook me / for someone / I briefly was. / Girl alight / with impending loss, / vessel for bearing / out an arch / -itectural illusion. A wall / isn’t truly built / to exclude, but to instate / something worth defending.

‘No words of a Savior are news to a Woman. / No words of a resurrection sound gospel[-enough] / when you are both the Crucifixion and the Crowd.’

Decomposition Study
By Tom Phan

‘Skin molted like a lazy adder/while sinew pooled like glue.//Bone fractured next/like desert rose glass/then melted too.’

‘We do not want to hover like a line of fog, a river’s shadow, but slower: shadows in conversation, gentle only when we don’t bother expecting to be heard.’

‘When I held him in my palm, I learned to love what made me. From time to time, I think about my father, his country, clean hands. I like to think of his hands as clean. I like to think I owe nothing to his body.’

‘A man kisses a pigeon and another kisses a dog and / both times I look away to gather the spikes of trees into a / dripping faucet.’

Uncertified
By Mehrnoosh Torbatnejad

‘did I ever tell the teacher / we invented a new language that a pair of six year olds spoke fluent / appeasement she pointed to the globe told me to tell him / this is the world and that is America’

We Set Our Tables
By Krystal A. Sital

‘Cracking the spine, we eat // With fingers mixing and mashing, / ladling for one another, / Karaili, pommecythe, cur-he, / spooning and sliding into our mouths, / Wiping the leaf green.’

“Nautical Shrouds”
By Vi Khi Nao

‘I roam. Sometimes in solitude; sometimes in a crowd. But unlike a dog, I do not die a little each day, subdued to the loyalty of my master. I die all at once if it must be.’

‘If you spark a flame and turn / it upside down, / you will find it is still / a flame.’

There are no refractions today / by the pepper flakes— in the glass. // The snails slept by the snap pea hooks / and cradles— I salted them. // Sometimes I drank / from a vapored gas— / I made ellipses with my glass.

‘My father likes silence and the past. // He votes for losing candidates (he is so unwilling to love charismatic men.) / He believes in the things we are given, like decency.’

‘these games draw lines / between crowds / i am one of many / who wonder, / how come the silicon valley / squats on san josé?’

To constellate; archipelago. // Portmanteau & neologize. // To fix a golden / foil across the mouth— // a burial mask / to keep the evil out. // To raise walled cities / stone & green with rain.

Self-Portrait as GPS
By Steven Chung

How the steering wheel / points nowhere except towards itself. / And such is the spinning of the mind: / everywhere. When we drove into new / cities it was only a different shape of haze.

‘No motions./A tonic in page display tufts,/call me switch-foot, a check away from homeless./You get there. Intentional.’

‘After midnight you assemble your limbs back to / their rightful place as you rid the pressure formed / by all day heat and no privacy.’

‘I lifted / an arm, to signify the range / of human voice. Somewhere in the week, / a detour from grief.’

We graze our fingers through damselfish schools, // but our appetites are as insatiate as the sea is for land. / We gnaw the shore, legs wound in seaweed, / skin flayed by the tongues of clams, pulling, pushing.

‘At Downtown Crossing // he trail the shoppers, buying nothing, & rub / his rented nose. He know: myself am hell. / His feet unmoved in the snow.’

‘How many times in the dark? A brick for every freedom to hold its dream in. Will the Sun make his own grim entrance?’

You said you were an ant, eyes frozen / on an indigo wave looming over the world. / (You reset every time / you move forward.)

‘All the bitter things, one by one, in a rush, / She wants to swallow. Clothed in blueblack scales in a forest of iodine-colored seaweeds, / She wants to be chased by a shark.’

To an Unknown Passenger
By Phinder Dulai

‘my hulled hands crash against the tide / to the unloved I will offer / a part of me / in hope my wards will be made complete / for another life’

‘There’s a piece of me / that has never been / to this country and another that never left. // I stare at strangers as if they might be friends. // It took three weeks of traveling / before anywhere looked like home.’

Death is a Festival
By Anis Shivani

‘He knew the genealogies and coats of arms of / all his neighbors, with pride at its right hand and / cruelty at its left’

‘when I am dark/ when I am no more light/ when I am no / more an abomination/ when I am no more shame/ when I am face / again/ when the collective being of me worships god, family, / education and the collective administrative silver spoon, / then I will be back in the fold.’

‘We are given a face, / which means we are given / a vessel of blood to call body, / & lungs–that know the alchemy / of altering wind into breath–the way / plants are always transforming / someone’s last words / into oxygen.’

‘We melted in amnesia, bubbled up / from the ocean, rinsed clean / of appetite, all healed, / all negated, a sequence of two spines / imitating an arrow. A jaguar loved us. / He licked where our hips had been, / and we cucooked in reply.’

‘You brace yourself against the oncoming. But today the sea glistens like the fish you used to scale.’

‘we need to reinvent the image of tragedy for the nation everyday / or even in the everyday / get incensed or pretend to be so or else there is no exit and no future’

‘All your potatoes on the ground—you were never meant for this. The camerawoman tiptoes around spilled tubers as she zooms in on your front teeth, tearing open a parcel of dried shrimp. ‘

‘Murder is to mitosis is to mercy. / We are mostly legs too: part tendon, part pardon, kicking / or curling.’

‘Being alive has again made something new, something that may not be true of justice but is a basic commonplace in evolutionary theory. To forebear is one attitude, rising in an infinite return another.’

‘If not agates, then barnacles, if not / sweet-smelling seaweed, then shattered shells./ The traveler need not journey on. // If not mussels, then sea glass, if not // smooth surfaces, then rocks pocked by anemones. / The traveler’s journey is one of return.’

‘Match lit by a shadow’s curiosity. / Though I was not there for it, I still tasted their meat // and their marrow held a sweetness.’

Lycoris Radiata
By Kou Sugita

‘Do you hear / the rainfall beating / on cowhide skin / father? It is the life / of autumn, / supernova / booming’

‘Your mouth a little wound with a little reason to be / involved is why alienation is a body part, which moves / you to harshly ask if death really wanted what it wanted, / if its sole duty is to be observed all the time.’

‘but what if it was something once / vulnerable, downy, and warm? // something severed or stillborn? // something with pulse and blood / and breath bitten right out of it?’

‘And they were a solemn people: naming / the world, mapping it out, arguing about what it meant. Clandestine as / husbands’

‘Pastor says / abstain, says sins of the flesh, says hell. But when we see the boys / with their strong corded necks that make us crazy, we want and we do not.’

“ALL WILL COME BACK FROM ROOTS – NOTHING KILLS BLACKBERRY – BUT WHERE ARE ALL THE SPARROWS”

‘They love long hours of blackout. / They love this snuffed out match / of a little city. To the dust that separates // stained lace. To the poor / thrum of humidity.’

‘The first boy that I dated weighted down his coif / with so much hair gel that the crest atop his pate / was hard as horses’ teeth’

‘No others no-place/what to do but hoard the remaining solaces’

‘It was the mind repeating itself out of hope— / a mind that inhabits the same metaphor over and over’

‘When I ask, the histologist responds, / Cells have no color. / We use ink to color the slides.’

‘I relinquish / the greatest thing I have / for my greatest wish. / I turn into sea foam. / I learn nothing / ceases to exist’

‘The world has a sleek, hot belly / A cue of white space, an inch or several yawning before the drop, towards volta’

Rajiv Mohabir: Two Poems
By Rajiv Mohabir

“in the jungle they hide until / the seekers, bearing lime leaves jail / them in the silver night.”

“I didn’t care whether they understood me, then I said, ‘Hello, hello,’ again, soldiers climbed out of their foxholes and looked at me, they couldn’t understand, but they knew where I came from, they just looked at me”

Never / reaching orgasm, / the colony names its price and I, / hot cent of foreign cash, / sell it slant. Daughters / say it with ozone: my sex is a metaphor / for too much / good luck.

Be calm. Soon / we will bear sentimentality, scent / what is lost in these cells with carrion, / asphodel, turpentine, forsythia / blooming somewhere in the dark.

When did I first realize my parents were not infinite? / That I could see the end of them? Past their capes & catchphrases?

eating crabs with your fingers pre-Spanish fork and spoon and pre-KFC native chicken you can be served by dancing feathered natives that is true it all tastes good

how to be clear as the earth without clinging to the sand? / flowing through my hands like water / one seed clings to my palm

‘in the haiku I send her / and the silence she sends back, / hell no, nan da yo, / call it off, snap it shut, trash / it, just let it be, let me be’

An Imaginary Lineage
By Nicholas Wong and Franny Choi

She petrified her / Secrets. “About what?” / That she’s been chosen. / “She chose silence.” How? / “Like the light, deeply / Fissured.

How scared God must have been / when the woman who ate all the fruit of the tree he’d planted / was cutting out each red body from / between her legs

Four Poems by José Garcia Villa
By Jose Garcia Villa

“In my desire to be Nude / I clothed myself in fire:— / Burned down my walls, my roof / Burned all these down.”

Timothy Liu: Two Poems
By Timothy Liu

Such atonalities / caught floating through four centuries / in flagrant delicto bear witness

swimming six thousand feet to the surface / the lights lure curiosity / from a sudden clearing / to the gingerbread house / where a hand has lighted the wick

Li Shangyin: Two Poems
By Li Shangyin

Upon entering a shrine, it seems to hold ghosts / The belly of an abbess suggests pregnancy / Behind a heavy curtain, the suggestion of people

Fatimah Asghar: Two Poems
By Fatimah Asghar

They send flowers before guns now / all the thorns plucked from the stems. / An order to weave the dirge / before the mortar sings.

as if smell promises taste and always delivers. / Pleasure, when observed, wets into compulsiveness.

If these are ghosts, trace them / in the dismal notes of the gutter, / the window’s drumming murmur

Such As by Wo Chan
By Wo Chan

I was the smell of ripe lemons in his oxbone nation. I was never / brave. But, he let me eat butter, held me like an egg.

I will float down the stream / until it ends. / Until it ends, the mines avoid me.

Canzone II by Eric Gamalinda
By Eric Gamalinda

I live inside this world that lives inside / me: in this dream, there is nowhere to hide.

Eugenia Leigh: Three Poems
By Eugenia Leigh

My mother left my father more than once. A favorite / family tradition observed when I was four. / Ten. Eleven. Twelve. Leaving is easier / the second time.

Rage dented the silver / trashcan / “fire-crack” or “schrack”

Aubade for Winter
By Sandra Lim and Aimee Nezhukumatathil

I went to see what people are really like / in a thousand human ways.

The work of nine ekphrastic poets

I should have pinned you / to that wall, but you have walked already / out of that drawn-on door.

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