I am trying to imagine my new life when I am returned to the place of my parents’ birth.

you choose to put yourself beneath its flag

Now it’s raining and I’m sixteen and unlicensed.

I once lost my name in a pyre

There are few men who will communicate with you in all the languages you know.

“Ringu (1998)” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)”

I have built my new tongue from old corpses.

their oceanic smell that screams where they come from instead of where they are carried to

As if it were instinct, you held tightly
to a slim bar of sunlight

I could make it alone
but I don’t want to.

Turns out it, too, wanted
to know more than what the body can do.

God I loved every one of those pigs we ate.

when i called him a callas lover ` of coz i meant careless

“a feather falls” and “by the river”

What time the young man’s life ended, no one knows.

birds are a scimitar waiting

“jota de manila” and “i recognize the silhouette”

now, don’t be fooled
flying isn’t easy

I’ve never seen my therapist
wear his winter coat outside

Are they happy?
Who knows?

By some miracle
his bike was still going bone straight.

maybe that makes me primal. or maybe it makes me whole.

our resistance our resistance our resistance our resistance

there are no more
orange groves in Jaffa.

If you play, you wish to be innocent. If you do not, you submit to empires.

one leftover lychee from last night’s mimosaing, mimosaed decadence

We are willing to be buried.

“Color” and “To a Friend I Miss”

the cows eat the remmants of dew/
the cows eat 乾 and 坤

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.

For all the Palestinians on hunger strikes in Israeli prisons

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

Today, the sky greets me awake.

By morning, everything fizzled.

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”

Excerpts from We Call to the Eye & the Night

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.

my body, young, averting / believing its own dream / of an earth that was / never hers.

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.

Where was I to look?

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.

I need memory to be boundless, then. More infinite than.

This was the way of a country.

우체국을 나서면 아직 태어나지 않은 음악처럼 | When I leave the post office, I’m like unborn music

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

the sweet, rich scent, / the cream and white of the magnolia blossom

I want — Evanescence — slowly. After great pain.

Two scholars exchange letters on poetry and climate

“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Glacier” and “Good Fossil Fuels”

How has climate change changed the way we write poetry?

Elsewhere, a new history / Of touch, not pitted against the land.

Hindi na ibinalik / ng mga dayo ang kinuhang / lupain | The settlers never returned / the land they grabbed

It is a wonder that anything was left of the road.

from “A Journey to the West”

Is it unfair to ask you to hope?

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

نەقەدەر گۈزەل- ھە / يوللار ئىچىدە / قايتىدىغان يول پەقەت ئۆيىگە |
Neqeder güzel–he / yollar ichide / qaytidighan yol peqet öyige |
of all the paths to take / is it not the most beautiful?

ئىنتىزارلىقنىڭ سۈبھىدۇر ئىسمى، / زۇلمەتنى چاققان ئەزان كېلىدۇ |
Intizarliqning sübhidur ismi, / Zulmetni chaqqan ezan kélidu. |
The name of longing is Dawn. / Breaking the chains of oppression, the call to prayer will come.

سۈڭەكلەر قىرىلىپ، ئۇۋىلىپ ھەتتا، / تەجىرىخانىدا ئەگىسە روھىم |
Even as my bones are scraped and rubbed / my spirit circles where this work is done

ئاي يۇلتۇزۇمنى شەپەرەڭلەرگە ساتقان كېچە |
Ay yultuzumni sheperenglerge satqan kéche |
Oh night, you sold the moon and star to the moths.

ئېقىپ كەتمەستىڭ كۆكتىن يۇلتۇزدەك، / سەن ئۈچۈن قانات، پەر بولغان بولسام |
Éqip ketmesting köktin yultuzdek, / sen üchün qanat, per bolghan bolsam. |
You may not have dropped from the blue like a star / if I were wings for you

يۇۋاشلىق.يۇۋاشلىق.يۇۋاشلىق |
Meekness. Meekness. Meekness.

كېرەك بولسا بىرقانچە پاي ئوق، \ ئات مېنى، يۈرىكىم بار پارتلايدىغان |
Kérek bolsa birqanche pay oq, / At méni, yürikim bar partlaydighan. |
If bullets are what you need, / shoot me, I have a heart that explodes.

When I imagined the worst, the storm always passed. 

Say: I am still alive in the birds flown west.

ئېزىپ باق بۈگۈن يوچۇن يوللاردا \ ھېچكىم يادىغا كەلمىگەن بىر رەت |
Try to get lost today on strange roads / A path where no one is called to mind

Аза бойым қаза болып осыған, / Балтаң маған тиердей-ақ шошынам. |
A sparrow if it sprouts, a stick if it falls, / my whole body is tingling.

ئۈمىدىم بۈگۈن خىيالدىن يۈكسەك |
Ümüdim bügün xiyaldin yüksek |
My hopes are greater than my thoughts today.

Guest editors Munawwar Abdulla and Rahima Mahmut reflect on hope and persistence in East Turkistan, in time for Nowruz.

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.

This is a poem about fire.

“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!”

You hear the sweet melody / While I see it with my eyes.

I know what I see / I know what I know

Deaf poets and interpreters in conversation

I took matters into my own hands, / Decided to be brave / I reclaimed my soul.

Deaf interpreters Xgamil Campos-Espinosa and Romduol Ngov in conversation

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.

after Basho

I don’t trust this reservoir of feeling

平和の条がキラキラと輝いている |
O how radiantly the Article of Peace sparkles

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?

“#26” and “#30”

A conversation with Jenny Xie

“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”

Have you been at the feast of the heated hearts? 

She ambushes the sky, burns a brand on its hip

Translated from Hanja (Old Korean) to Hangul (modern Korean) and then English

I speak with the weight of / hours left on this side of the pacific

I am only the height and width of a girl. 

Locheequat, fruit of the non-doing.

There is a waxing // for every waning.

I was struck by the world I tasted—woods, Baja California granite, the winter of the grapes’ growth.

After Rebecca Lindenberg

A notebook on alchemy, memory, and sensation

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

The poet on her ghosts and inspirations.

The first reading I ever gave was at Basement Workshop

The poet talks with Eileen Tabios about his writing process and how “language can be a thicket and brambles”

“It’s not really about trauma—it’s about what it means to resurrect out of that.”

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

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

“I wanted to turn to actual living language—and reveal, through poetry, the contradictions or erasures or sometimes comic possibilities imposed by different texts.”

It can’t with words on paper / It can’t with words / It can’t

You hear Mama tell you / that you must be waiting for her to die to live your life.

My whole life I heard her sing. / I never heard her speak.

While I was doing witness work around violence, I was also always living in a shadow space where I could be safer, where I could be protected, where I was known, where I could not be misread

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

I’m severe I’m severed I’m savior—

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.

Poems and translations by Lan Anh, Thu Uyên, Thùy Dương, and Nhi Đàm

But the children are frolicking inside the palace of their mother’s empty stomach. They can’t say whether it’s day or night.

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

my fingers still remember the days-old-stubbles

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

The witch was not thorough / with her magic

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

I’m starting to believe in small magics like / astrology and sudden rain

we inherited sickly
 / roots our ancestors couldn’t plant / deep enough to
 / grow

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

“For Korean women writers, for whatever kind of poetry they want to write, I think this country has excellent soil for growing in any direction you want.”

Love letters spill / down the narrow stairs as I leave. I think I would like nothing / to miss her like I do, hence this tenderness, hence my hands smudging / myself. 


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.

We continue in our bookmarks series with works that sing, dissolve boundaries, and gather voices together

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?

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.

We ride knife-cut roads across this back / of continent to the prairie’s torn edge / to a place where shadows limn loess

I turn the page in this war criminals diary because I / can’t stop

& on the drive to LAX /when I ask you not to cry this time, you look / at me with reverence as if to say, what came from me / is so much more than I am

Perhaps it is now the other way around, / and I have become an almost-perfect lover, / caring little that the Gods love poets less.

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.

At this / moment there are more than two dozen / revolutions occurring around the globe in / Chile, Lebanon, Hong Kong, France, Sudan.

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.

Older now, the sparrow God / gave my grandmother in place /of succulence.

The author of Ghost Of on the importance of constraint, the page as a field, and facilitating findings among her students

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

the heft and cleave required / of living / with a nation on your skin / under the broken yellow toenail / of the forgotten

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.

What I want / is to be unspooled from my navel until / not even my body can keep me. Wildened to morsels / of mortal sound, I crave only the crown of being unseen.

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

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

the hot air rising from the cooker / has tightening effect on your lovehole

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

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.

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.

On the 150th anniversary of the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad, Paisley Rekdal revisits the legacy of the Chinese railroad workers who reshaped the American West.

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.

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.

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.

Bạn sẽ gọi quê hương bằng một đại từ nào? Tôi sẽ gọi đó là một ám ảnh | What pronoun would you use to call your birthsoil? I would call it a haunting

夜來沉醉卸妝遲 || With night you sink drunk slow to undo/ your hair

Can I call my death “I”?

was it a gentle human hand, or black-furred / long-clawed

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

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.

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

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.

Banknotes / dropped, jawbones dropped, and it was truly / unnerving, to watch the white people / stare at me, mouths / twitching in awe or pity, / or both.

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.

what I don’t get is why / you choose to come here

as I bear loneliness in the shrieks of iron, it carved / my residence registration on a hole-punch

This is a rectangular dream / which inevitably brings forth a rectangular waiting / a floating country can’t pillow a broken dream / and I’ve never dared say goodnight

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

Tonight, too, there are turning lines…/ I say I do not know, do not know.

love you because i / hate your lovers loving your peripheral love

Taking advantage of opacity, Girl E goes for it and punches indiscriminately.

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

into such sen / sitivity of it / such sense / could not say

Ultrasound waves / pulse between fluid, tissue, and bone一 / the embryo echoes.

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?

After a sperm whale sucks in a squid, it will vomit out its beak.

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

Marilyn Chin talks bad girl haikus, pissing off your ancestors, and her new career-spanning collection, A Portrait of the Self as Nation.

Fatimah Asghar’s insistence on joy is a refusal of the demand that marginalized writers flatten trauma for the white gaze

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.

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.

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.

The poets talk creative collaboration, gardening, epistolary poetry, and the intimacy of sentences.

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

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.

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.

We are our skins; we are our hides. But my skin, and the skin of others like me, has been torn. It is at the site of this gash that our identity coheres, that our identity is espied.

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.

What a review of Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds tells us about critics’ narrow perceptions of immigrant and war-affected identities

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.

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.

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.

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

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

How the Japanese American poet, art critic, and performer helped shape Modernist poetry as he brought Japanese poetic forms into English

Journalist Jennifer Crandall is re-claiming Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” through the voices and stories of the South.

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

We wonder if this is what heaven is like—an old movie theater with thick velvet curtains that part, as the lights dim and the naked cherubs peering down from the blue and gold ceiling vanish, like comets.

I want to make / change and am ready / for new challenge. / I can stay between white white lines.

The Hong Kong poet talks the Umbrella movement, being an outsider and an insider in Hong Kong, and how she translates the world.

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

How do I tell you that I have done this before? / How to build a diorama of what I am not.

The floor broke apart / the tasbeeh into ninety / nine beady reflections / and my mother is still / able to fake a surprise / when she can’t locate / them all.

I am the last of them—a woman with her own dreams, not salvaged from the cloud-based data lake that I created.

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.

They might spend most of their days in the sky, / but every evening they remember / to come back to earth.

I lay my head down on a pillow pilled / with characters, yellow tracks and traces / of the name I was given.

but really every word sounds like the sun/ sweltering in the middle of Santacruzan

I was her American / daughter, my tongue / my hardest muscle / forced to swallow / a muddy alphabet.

The world held us / In glass circles

Poet Chen Chen talks finding your family, queer Asian American poetry, and Journey to the West.

Think about it: if rain accumulating above someone / resumes descent, where does it fall?

I tell C no one loves me like a mother would. / C says no one loves a fragile queer. I choke / on the thread as it slices words out:/ Say Ma say Mother America say Mother India say love me like a mother won’t.

‘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.’

Kimiko Hahn, Monica Youn, Sally Wen Mao and Emily Yoon joined us for a night of poetry.

People judge me by my skin. My skin’s purpose in life is to prove them wrong.

This week’s articles are about the current U.S. political climate–but don’t worry, we have some new tunes for you to enjoy, too!

The poet talks about her debut collection, sharing silenced histories in her writing, and being a “wild girl poet.”

The two poets talk about their literary family trees, poetry as a protective force, and the changing landscape for Muslim American writers.

‘This drought of silence / that does not feed me. I mean, I refuse / to hold his vanity. And demand to know / myself better. Cull his soul but only / for memory, carve a history / for myself in which my reflection / alone can be seen.’

Three Sessions, 3 hours each (6-9pm) Wednesdays June 14th, June 21st, June 28th Fees & Payment Options: $250 General / $220 AAWW Members (Become a Member!) Full payment due before first class. Maximum of fifteen students. *EARLY BIRD! Sign up before June 1st for $200 General / $180 AAWW Members* *STUDENT RATE for limited seats, […]

‘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.’

‘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.’

Transcendent American poet Max Ritvo wrote that if the world outside a poet’s head is more interesting than the world inside their head, they might as well become a journalist. His point: it’s what’s inside the poet’s mind, what (or who) is hooting or singing or moaning or gagging inside the poet’s own totally unique […]

Muslim Ban CliffsNotes, honoring the late, great Bharati Mukherjee, why Fred Korematsu’s story still matters today, and more.

‘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.’

Dissecting the violence of state, warfare, and language

Poets Claudia Rankine and Hoa Nguyen speak with Rigoberto Gonzalez about the urgent need for poetry as a force for political change.

An interview with Bay Area poet, teacher, and artist Mg Roberts on interpreting graffiti, fragmented immigrant narratives, and how everyday is an opportunity to revise

Poet Philip Metres talks about why he chose to create an opera from a redacted history of torture

19 writers respond to Michael Derrick Hudson’s yellowface

Writer-artist-professor Tan Lin talks fictive relatives, the narrative of an immigrant TV culture, and ‘becoming Chinese’ in America

What recent race scandals by avant-garde poets Kenneth Goldsmith and Vanessa Place have to do with sunglasses, the invention of the fingerprint, and the atom bomb.

Cathy Linh Che talks about her debut collection of poems, Split, and what it means to mimic flashbacks of war, immigration, and sexual violence.

An interview with spoken word duo DarkMatter on radical desis, the legacy of Partition, Twitter poems and The Perks of Being a Wallflower

I don’t teach my girls / to brave the violence of sun, sons, or stings. / When resources run out, don’t sit there and behave. / Abandon hive.

A review of Tarfia Faizullah’s debut poetry collection Seam, and an interview with the poet

When poet and First Lady Chirlane McCray (aka “FLONYC”) chose spoken word artist Ramya Ramana to perform at her husband’s inauguration, it took the ceremony—and Ramya’s poetry—to a whole new level.

2014 will go down as an historic year for poetry. We’re feting Sally Wen Mao‘s debut Mad Honey Symposium. Dave Eggers likes its “gritty, world-wise sense of humor that gives her work heavyweight swagger.” Also just released: Cathy Linh Che‘s Split, a tender exploration of  war, diaspora, and violence, and Tarfia Faizullah‘s Seam, based on interviews with women survivors of the 1971 Pakistani […]

“Asian American Poetry” is not a manageable category—it is not a list.

My palms cannot hold back the shifting currents. / They can slap a rhythm, hoist / a banner, hold / your face tenderly between them

An interview with poet Tung-Hui Hu

I hate you, poem, for wanting to know the truth. / The truth is, I trusted the sky. / Trusted it wouldn’t throw things at us

The rivers / and trenches glossed with light / know we are so relentless as to plan / for catastrophe

The key to enjoying the jubilant, fleshy dread of Feng Sun Chen’s supercut poem is appreciating what one might call the bodily turn in poetry.

Poetic responses to the literature of the Ghadar movement

The author of The Boss thinks she might be the only person left on this planet without an iPod—but her poems are certianly full of music.

This New York-based poet once dreamt of being a trapeze artist.

her boss multiplies into millions of circles the boss / multiplies her zeroes

Link-bait for the Monday-challenged.

Sahar Muradi and Zohra Saed are two Afghan American poets. This is a lyrical conversation between Sahar, who returned to retrace footsteps in Afghanistan and Zohra, who remained ensconced in longing for mythic cities of her birth.

How can poets mobilize poetry as a change agent? These poets demonstrate the ways that the arts can contribute to the defense of the environment, workers, and oppose war. Philip Metres will discuss the ways in which projects such as Peace Show (Cleveland) and the “Stories of War and Peace Oral Narratives Project” have become […]

Marilyn Chin said: ‘Our poetry is not a static enterprise but a thriving, historical progression.’ As we look at Asian American poetry today, much as changed, yet much has stayed the same. This panel will feature a group of diverse literary critics, anthologists, and poets in a vibrant discussion to grapple with questions such as: […]

Add power to your poetic punches and fleetness to your formal footwork. These classes will focus on adding techniques, tension, and twists to your expressive toolbox. Specific classes will focus on landing leaps, torquing turns, and the uses and abuses of certain voids. There will be a weekly writing assignment and workshop as well as […]

Remaining unnoticed is not a new thing for Staten Island.

“I have a mole on the bottom of my foot, and some of my more superstitious relatives told me that if you have a mole on the sole of one foot, you’ll always yearn to visit new places more than most.”