SURVIVAL #
We went into the garden to pick out a poison blocker
We saw fish mint
A lizard’s tail
A chameleon plant
Your heartleaf
My fishwort
Our bishop’s weed
We are tender stalks
A fuzzy palindrome
I’m your upside-down egg
You’re my bird’s nest soup
FAKE HAIKU
I text C—— a poem about a bird with one wing
She replies by mailing me a piece of cloth
Cut from the pillow she sits on to meditate
●
My pronouns are shipyard, jellyfish & ten
I sorely miss the city
The angels miss me more
●
Locked in a bevy of worrisome corners
I turn the river over to rub its belly
Uncertain how long it will take
●
Mãng cầu, yêu cầu
Our fruits often share the same desire
Wishy heights of romance
●
We slip into a daily performance
Discovering micro-utopias
A matter of loving the wind
●
My pronouns are free, heard & floral
Belly button as shiny as a dime
Swirling on the linoleum floor
●
In love I wake up first
I sweep the floor
Wherever the grass is long
●
Bite into a sugar rose
What do you feel?
Who will trim the weeping willow?
CATCHING FISH WITH TWO HANDS
(Waterbed flirtation session)
Heart skips
into rose
colored camo
Extension cord
rests in a pile
An onion asleep
is a congregation
Going home to feed
unanswerable
reservoirs
My father sharpens
his knives
to cut oranges
The mind dips
a white swan
swimming in a green latte
What came first:
a second or its hand?
I is anchored
by its little head
Jaw a compass
A number
that rhymes
with two
Hold my head
beneath the strainer
My hair will catch
laws of warmth
laws of loss
Epitome of impatience
drying on the roof
Jasmine green blossoms
quite good for a luck charm
A bear cry is the sound a bear makes
while feeding baby birds
to comfort them
Half eaten seeds
blow off into the sea
My watch tilts
toward public crying
Question marks
are the wettest
part of my body
Stacey Tran is a writer from Portland, Oregon. She is the creator of Tender Table, a storytelling series about food, family, and identity. Her writing can be found in diaCRITICS, The Fanzine, Gramma, and The Volta. Wendy’s Subway released her first chapbook, Fake Haiku (2017). She is the author of Soap for the Dogs (Gramma, 2018).
From personal ads compiled as narrative to a frame-by-frame retelling of a short film on grazing sheep, Nao’s poems and stories are acrobatic experiments in form.
The writer on romance under capitalism, Nietzsche, sex work, and freedom from the tyranny of the sentence.
The poet’s new collection of essays, Minor Feelings, threads intense friendships, “bad” English, and standup comedy into a meditation on the Asian-American experience.
Work that is just about the technical or conceptual, personal or political, is fine; it meets the world with what’s in fashion. But there’s something else bordering on magic, that brings an artwork home, makes it land and resonate. You can’t really teach that so much as conjure it.
Kara Walker
