My nose is bleeding
Should I go see my Sex and the City doctor.
She’d be like, did you move here for a man or a job.
I’m walking in Midtown,
I’m like, good for you in your colorful outfit.
Sad for a sea of black.
I went to California with a youthful aching in my heart
and I left it there / didn’t.
My sister’s and my text relationship is so I do this, I do that.
I text her, I washed my new bra and it’s so tightI keep gasping for air in my cubicle.
She writes back, I fell asleep on the train
and when I woke up a spider was dangling in front of my eyes.

My cartoon world where I live with you.
Where I float across the ocean.
Where I miss my stop every day
but it doesn’t matter / girl power.
Sometimes I post the things in my head
onto the Internet for a certain few.
For those to whom I’m like “good for you,”
your pastel dress in a sea of black
Maybe I’m like, hungry.
Gluten free Oreos. Can’t hear myself think.
I’m listening to “Free Fallin'” on my Walkman.
I go into the grocery store and they’re playing it too.
Cause I forgot the line & Tom Petty reminded me.
I wanna fly down over Mulholland /
wanna collapse on the grocery store floor.
The universe told me to go into the grocery store
and buy just cookies and milk.
D would’ve called it a “heroic purchase.”
My therapist was like, maybe you’re not over it.
The taste of the milk bored my tongue.

I’m walking around the grocery store.
“Epic” by Faith No More.
I’m running on the treadmill listening to
Lady Gaga and thinking about my sister.
And my sister calls and leaves a message
that she was listening to Lady Gaga
on the treadmill and thinking of me.
I text her two girls and two crystal ball emojis.
What if D dies.
And I’m like, how could you not need poetry?
Walking home w/ my grocery bag on my arm,
it feels like a tourniquet.
Use my computer as an extension cord.
Exercise or sleep.
You emptied the laundry all over the bed
and I screamed like a bomb exploded.
All the things that I’m interested in.
Will I take a selfie at the end of the world.

______________________________

A previous version of this poem appeared in Blush Lit. Diary by Marisa Crawford is available via Spuyten Duyvil Press.

THE INTERVIEWER WANTS TO KNOW ABOUT FASHION

 “They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.”
—Ayelet Shaked

 Think of all the calla lilies.
Think of all the words that rhyme with calla.
Isn’t it a miracle that they come back?
The flowers. The dead. I watch a woman
bury her child. How? I lost a fetus
and couldn’t eat breakfast for a week.
I watch a woman and the watching is a crime,
so I return my eyes. The sea foams like a dog.
What’s five thousand miles between friends?
If you listen close enough,
you can hear the earth crack like a neck.
Be lucky. Try to make it to the morning.
Try to find your heart in the newsprint.
Please. I’d rather be alive than holy.
I don’t have time to write about the soul.
There are bodies to count.
The news anchor says oopsie.
The Prime Minister says thanks.
There’s a man wearing his wedding tuxedo to sleep in case
I meet God and there’s a brick of light before each bombing.
I dream I am a snake after all.
I dream I do Jerusalem all over again. This time,
I don’t shake my hair down when the soldier tells me to.
I don’t thank them for my passport.
Later my grandfather said they couldn’t have kept it.
You know that, don’t you?
I don’t know what they couldn’t do.
I only know that enormous light.
Only that roar of nothing,
as certain and incorrect as a sermon.

feels dangerous, and almost nothing like traveling to Saint-Rémy when my wife was expecting and beginning to show, her morning sickness lifting, to pass through Roman arches and chrome-yellow wheat fields beneath desiccated cypresses lining trails pocked with irises and blue mulberries where van Gogh painted through barred windows (omitting said bars), and eschewing the guided tour we indulged ourselves instead in the market square gorging on cheeses so slender the two of us even her despite her bulge; then zigzagging downhill into the grand allées between colonnades of sighing plane trees stretching in the straightaway across for the intimation murmuring from her body to mine: our child tumble-turning inside. How could we know what was waiting for us just around the bend? In the afternoon we pulled over to rest our eyes drowsy from the drive in a gravelly rest stop, shoulder to shoulder like effigies with our seats reclined and the windows wide, dandelions unfurling in a breeze.

Image courtesy of the author.

________________________

Excerpted from Survivor’s Notebook. Used with permission of the publisher, Acre Books. Copyright 2023 © by Dan O’Brien.

Midway or the midpoint of my life
I understood the need to decompress
There was never enough tenderness in texts
Storms rolled through every day for weeks
I drove through some of them

I drove through many strip malls on the way—it felt familiar
The sign said “window tinting” or “sunless tanning”
I drove through and forgot immediately
Along the way were many forms of tyranny
The mist rolled up the mountain as I drove

I rolled the window down and rolled it up again
I said, I can’t take you a mile down the road
It was because he was he, not because he was poor
She ate her oatmeal like a much older woman
She furrowed her brow but it could no longer be furrowed
Chemicals and plastics make such differences

Closets and cabinets etc. make such differences
Everybody wants to give me a china set
No one in this life wants a china set
Oh just set her up in a house
No you can’t even sell it

Oh I found us a red wooden house by a creek
I found us a white house with a vegetable garden already going strong
Oh I found us a kitchen of windows
I know I said I didn’t want to go outside ever again
No but I did

______________________________________________

Reprinted with permission from The Upstate by Lindsay Turner, published by The University of Chicago Press. © 2023 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

Is it selfish to wish for more than to survive?
I see you, bare arms gleaming in the sun-

struck snow, I see the browned roast
you brought to your wine-stained lips

the stack of books you read, and those boots
that last fall you loved yourself in.

I see you in them again on this roll call
morning stroll through what intimate data

strangers tell me about their lives.
Once upon a time I asked them to

or they asked me, who can recall,
I’m into it, I guess. I like to watch,

at least, I can’t seem to stop, but I can’t
bear to share, so I’ll tell you here:

the cat finally came home last night—
spooked by so many fireworks barking,

he hid somewhere unsearchable for a while
no matter how I called and called.

He chose me, I like to say since the day
I found him starving on the porch.

I know the night is full of unsteady boats
on cold seas and horrible cages

and people far more alone than me
I’m sorry for your loss, your cancer,

the accident you had no way to see coming
and the one you did have an inkling of

I’ve learned how important it is to say
because of how difficult it is to say

and how loudly loneliness fills the silence
although, like anything, it depends—

for instance, I still can’t unhitch my breath
from even the softest whisper of your name.

__________________________________

From Dream Apartment by Lisa Olstein. Copyright © 2023. Used by permission of Copper Canyon Press.

It goes doorbell
(two beats)
then knocking
(three or more beats)
or knocking
(five beats)
then doorbell (three times,
two beats each).
The very first beat disappears
the front door.
We abrupt.
We.
Any way possible, silence.
Beat beat
then beat beat beat beat.
We crawl to Mother
and Father’s closet
staying close
to the grout.
Together we have
four pairs of legs.
I am short and young
enough already
not to be seen
and Brother is taller and
growing. Beat beat beat
beat beat beat beat
beat beat beat beat.
Our hearts (four)
are summoned into this
beating, so the sound of
heavy listening
(Mother heavy listens best).
Our hearts (four)
are so impressionable, our ears
(eight) are so airless
and impressionable.
Beat beat.
In the closet we crouch
on top of each other
(Father’s disappearance
that close) and look
like more legs.
Beat beat
beat beat
beat.
The house black and whites.
Brother and I heavy
listen to Mother looking at Father
as though he is
her husband only.
Our impressionable hearts
(two),
our airless ears
(four).
Beat
beat
beat
beat
beat
beat
beat
beat
beat
beat
beat.
On the property’s
perimeter,
legs
(two)
with large feet in boots
on the patio.
That sound.
That close.

_____________________________

Excerpted from Have You Been Long Enough at Table by Leslie Sainz. Published with permission from Tin House. Copyright © 2023 by Leslie Sainz.

Admittedly, there is something about its face,
the boxy pugilistic snout, the prehistoric eyes
that seem to stare down through

80 million years back to the very days of T-rex.
Though taxonomically the frilled shark is no snake
cutting through the lightless waters 5,000 feet down,

the creature looks to be the very essence
of the reptilian brain—cold-blooded, beyond
even the crocodile, that seemingly soul-less

armory of plates, a creature grounded wholly in the now
with no inner life beyond the moment. What would it be
to be this presence skirting through the dark

with its rows of teeth, a consciousness beyond mind
that watches what mind does, its sorrows,
a being that grows its young for three and a half years

in the dark night of its belly, the longest gestation
of any in the animal kingdom, and how it only comes to us
from time to time, pulled up in some fisherman’s net

for all to behold the undying wonders of the sea?
To have lived on into the anthropocene,
this creature mostly blind, simply structured, unchanging,

feeding on small squids and fishes, others of its kind—
please don’t misunderstand. I believe God does not exist
in time, but because we do, we cannot understand It.

But imagine eighty million years, passing second by second.
When I look at this silvery beast, I see God.

__________________________________

From Auction: Poems by Quan Barry. Copyright © 2023. Reprinted with permission from the University of Pittsburgh Press.

the more i learn, the more i learn
i don’t know what the fuck
i’m talking about. someone
who doesn’t care a fig for poetry
might think i knew a lot
yet in most bookshops i’m lost,
shelves heavy with the bodies
of forgotten writers. it’s relative.
a president can say audacity or
a president can say sad & both eat
the slow-cured meat of empire.
when i say i carry my people
inside me i don’t mean a country.
the star that hangs from my neck
is simply a way of saying israel
is not a physical place but can be
written down & carried anywhere.
it says my people are most beautiful
when moving, when movement,
when our only state is the liquid
state of water, is adapting to our container.
homeland sometimes just means
what books you’ve read, what stories
you spread with your sneakers.
my people, any place you live
long enough to build bombs
is a place you’ve lived too long—
it’s relative. my friends, the only
thing i know for sure is the missiles
on television are only beautiful
if you’ve never known suffering.
my friends, the only country i will ever
pledge my allegiance to
is your music, is under investigation
for treason.

______________________________

Excerpted from Pig by Sam Sax. Copyright © 2023 by Sam Sax. Reprinted with Permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. This poem previously appeared in the American Poetry Review.

Dong Li is a multilingual author who translates from the Chinese, English, French, and German. Born and raised in China, he was educated at Deep Springs College and Brown University. His full-length English translations from the Chinese include Song Lin’s The Gleaner Song (Giramondo & Deep Vellum, 2021) and Zhu Zhu’s The Wild Great Wall (Deep Vellum, 2018). He has received fellowships from Akademie Schloss Solitude, Camargo and Humboldt Foundations, MacDowell, PEN/Heim Translation Fund, Yaddo, and others. His debut poetry collection The Orange Tree (The University of Chicago Press, 2023) is the inaugural winner of the Phoenix Emerging Poet Book Prize.

*

Peter Mishler: Is there a moment, image, or memory from your childhood or youth that somehow hints that you’d write poems as an adult?

Dong Li: I started poetry late, as I was discouraged to pursue creative writing in school back in China. American English gave me a second chance. I was enrolled in a tiny cowboy-philosopher school in the Californian desert. I felt intensely the limitation of my language abilities and practical skills in a seemingly harsh landscape. I remember walking in the desert and lying flat on the lonely highway that cut through it. I spread my fingers to grab onto the concrete as the sky became overwhelmingly close and started to shift. The clouds became a godsend and carried my first poems.

PM: What would you be willing to share about these first poems?

DL: One of the few real poems that came out of these first clumsy, albeit earnest, attempts was titled “To Cloud.” The clouds became the capitalized singular “Cloud” without an article, as if I were addressing a living thing. It was indeed alive and a friend during these grueling years, when my face became smeared by sand and stars in the increasingly less surreal desert environment. A time for my initiation, in which I relied on the sky for the dial of the day. More than a wall that echoed back my anxious projections, “Cloud” highlighted the distance between words and feelings, while accentuating the affinity between the “you” and the “I” in the poem. “Cloud” was the reflexive addressee “you,” from which the “I” was slowly apart. I was trying to emulate Lorine Faith Niedecker and her “condensery,” which resulted in the poem, but realized that the “I,” my poetic child, wanted to grow out of that early influence, so I wrote a speech in prose about my family history, which sowed the seeds for this collection, The Orange Tree.

PM: Did you feel a pull, urgency, or anxiety that drove you to write this prose speech?

DL: As the only PoC and foreign student in my class, I wanted to close the gap of misunderstanding by drawing in my less-privileged familial context. I wanted to share a sad story, hoping to soften the rough edge of my encounter with this utopian community. I wanted to leave the critical and poetic shield aside and talk unprotectedly. I wanted to see whether a switch of the genre gears would strengthen my grasp on American English. I wanted to hold the child tottering in a new language and the receding Chinese self in both arms. As I knocked myself out to piece the speech together, it felt like a gestation overdue. I reverted to the pantry of my survival word-kit and ventured to cook up a concise and cohesive narrative in irreducible sentences. I wiped away the invisible tears after each period. As I read out loud my first draft, I heard a sound, so familiar and yet far away, eerily mine and more than mine. It did not profess to be poetry. A revelatory moment: Perhaps poetry was something that recognized its unpredictable milieu and reclaimed its sound.

PM: Do you have artists in your family? What were you drawn to in your reading and writing in China?

DL: My mother’s brother, the youngest and only surviving male child of the maternal family, is a painter and teacher. He was among the first group of students that went to college in 1977 when college education was reinstated after a decade of hiatus due to political turmoil. All the family resources were poured into the brother’s education and wellbeing. Stripped of educational opportunities, his six sisters were often forced to skip school and take on knitting work to support him. I was averse to this kind of treatment, but was not mature enough to understand the sisters’ acceptance of their deprivation.

I was less interested in conventional literature that lauded such sacrifices and estranged love. Literature from a distant age or place seemed an exception, whose new context itself was liberating. I was drawn to the interior depth of women and their work. In the little space afforded them, they talked back and forth and fought and formed bonds between the stove and the washing board. Kitchen gossips turned into giggles; courtyard dances cheered up dispirited disputes. It was joyful for me to use writing to get a glimpse of the sisters’ little freedom theaters. That joy presumed, for my younger self, a sense of secret knowing. Still, it felt restrictive to fictionalize names and use the language the family could read. Another language turned out to be the easy remedy.

PM: What was that like for you, to simultaneously experience a new country and begin your creative work there?

DL: It felt like seeing the child of me trying to stand up for the first time, knowing that it was left alone to fumble and find its bearings in the new language. It could grab onto the invisible hands of memory, but they would pull it back to the old strictures that it had just escaped from. The bright days of curiosity collided with the restless nights of unknowing. The child had to go both ways, like a small tree plant. It fingered the wind that shaped the music and mores of its surrounding. It broke up the tough soil that sustained and stimulated its development. Light was essential. Isn’t language always the light that launches us into the relational pool of living? I owe my courage to the desert. I was forced to articulate in a verbal community. I dug dirt. Inchmeal, the child stood up and babbled in joy. That’s where I began.

PM: What was the experience like for you to write so many different kinds of lines in this book? How do you see these forms in relation to each other, now that you’re able to look at the collection as a whole?

DL: Much like my experience in the desert where tumbleweeds wilfully rolled, I stumbled and scratched myself everywhere as I scrambled to put this debut collection together. The poetic child of me, who was absorbing American English, was messing around, and wanted to try various things. In retrospect, this kind of unencumbered curiosity was part of the openness that entertained the possibility of numerous forms, but what determined the different kinds of lines was the material I gleaned from mostly the women in the family. I wanted the book to host the whole shebang, their ghosts and suppressed songs.

I was having a hell of a good time, exposing the material and experimenting with appropriate forms to accommodate it. I used words to layer the thickness of the poetic core, around whose orbit scattered forms surfaced and swung into a synchronized constellation. I was happy to forget myself in this windswept tale of invisible tears. The single-line statements of the title poem might be seen as a step after a strenuous step toward unveiling the scarred splendor of survival and continuum. The blank lines in the double-spacing of the same titular poem hope to give room to the dead who add weight and weather to the surrounding silence. Sometimes, the vertical form is a tombstone; other times, a playful reversal of the Classical Chinese reading custom. Sometimes, the poem lies flat to flatter the narrative flow; other times, the prose deceitfully prolongs the poetic pull. Aren’t poetry and prose siblings that fight during the day and get along at night? This family of forms intends to capture the fading faces of the now familiar material and delay their disappearance.

PM: “Is death the only family.” is such a strikingly memorable line early on in The Orange Tree. Can you talk about how and when you made this line?

DL: One of the factors that triggered the seed of the prose speech about my family history to sprout into this poetry collection was the death of my paternal grandfather. The news of his death was withheld by my parents for over a year until I returned to Chinese soil. They said that Grandpa, on his deathbed, preferred not to interrupt my studies in the U.S. Isn’t love a wound, often covered, or only revealed in aching ways? Death obliterated the gap of time between my parents and me, hurtling us into this unknown presence that strangely but tangibly united us. It was also this other sphere we stared at blindly, in tears. “Is death the only family.” is an impassioned existential query, but the period indicates an emphatic resolution. Like death, the integral question is paradoxically there and not there. This questing statement is closer to a graveyard that called for my visits and provided for my latent seed. As I wrote the line on American soil, the physical and linguistic distance eased my acceptance of Grandpa’s death, whose intensity nevertheless commanded a lexical transformation. The grief turned from a lake that kept pooling to a recurrent river that gathered what it loved. Soiled, I wrote along this longing course.

PM: When you are reciting poems from this book now during readings, do these same feelings arise or are they new feelings?

DL: I like my readings to share the same emotive latitude as the locale. I try to get a sense of the tempo and temperament of the events and select sections accordingly. Obviously, I cannot recite the whole book, so I translate each reading into a curated performance that echoes the collection. These same feelings ripple out from the recital and still ring true to its core. Before reading out loud from the page, I look around the room until I hear the poems from a distance, as if they came from the audience and their muted words. The griefriver widens its course. As my eyes take in the light reflected from these shared syllables, I know the collection will chart its ground of growing pains. The babbling child is ready to walk its own way. I let it go and follow what love dictates.

PM: Readers will find a short glossary following the poems in this book. When did you decide to include the glossary?

DL: After making a mess and then another bigger mess with the manuscript, I was looking for ways of taming the untamable, and I aspired to fail gracefully. I borrowed from the construction of compound words in German, which I was struggling with at the time, and created a list of words as section breaks. I culled almost all the words from the following sections and let them sit elbow-to-elbow. The pressure of leaving out the space between words led to a fresh look at them, both individually and collectively, gaining a new compressed velocity that was more conducive to reflection. These lists of compound words could be seen as condensed signposts that contained their own mystery or translations of poetry back into words that first brought the material into a meaningful and musical order. As the lists became more complex to mirror the gradual drop of punctuation in the corresponding sections, the collection came to a final contracting density that I felt needed an expansive release, so I decided to lay bare my method for the manuscript by assembling all the compound words in one place, which recalled all the sections and evoked the memory of reading and re-reading. I titled the glossary poem “in search of words,” in the hope that such a lexicon would give clues to the unannounced and unarmed words of love only poetry could briefly hold in the long ears of listening.

PM: Could you talk a little about what your day-to-day writing process or routine looks like?

DL: I don’t really have a particular process or routine. I prefer playgrounds over rituals. I juggle a couple jobs for my hungry belly and strive to live as simply as possible, so that I can have time to serve my curiosities and fiddle with my interests. I am lucky to have an enclosed writing space that carries ghostly echoes. I hang up postcards on the wall with clothespins and wear these items of love to the keyboard. My current laptop is a hand-me-down from Don Mee Choi, which reminds me of my first from the late C.D. Wright. I write with these debts.

PM: Would you be willing to share your most recent observations on the twin processes of translating other poets and writing poems under your own name?

DL: I believe all languages come from the common tongue of poetry, where they long to converge. Translation of other poets often uncovers the forgotten tributaries or the contrarian undercurrents of a language that keeps arriving at the shared source. From this vantage point, translators can see what’s already done well and what fails to push the page and is worth another shot. In short, they understand the context of poetry that resists the suppression of chronological history. Isn’t poetry what cannot get lost in translation? Isn’t poetry the only heritage language for the poetic child? When I write poems in American English, I don’t have the same baggage of a canonical tradition as a first-language writer. I absorb its light to show my wound but refuse to be assimilated. I hunger for all the radiance on this earth. Translation becomes a reference point of negative capability in an enlarged multilingual context. I write toward the approximation of this radiance. I used to be burdened by a responsibility for the poets and their poems that I translate. Now I shed my vanity and possessive armors to embrace the possibility of multiple versions and variations. In a similar vein, I forgo the ambition of mastery and steady my poetic ship of longing toward each light and lightning along the way. It is lovely for you to call the writing and translation of poems “twin processes.” They gestate in the same water and glow from the same wound.

PM: What is the strangest thing you know to be true about the art of poetry?

DL: Poetry is everywhere and everybody has it. Often we direct our deepest feelings toward this unspeakable thing and call it poetry. Often we don’t give ourselves permission to speak it out loud. But when we do, we feel utterly alive. We add our layer of skin to a language we embody and enact. We see our silhouette coming into focus in these familiar and familial words that go into and out of our body and give breath to our singular sound. There is lament on poetry’s retreat from the public into private spheres, but I look to its rediscovery and reemergence inside of us. In a reckless rain, we lean into the nocturnal neck of poetry. We fall on its back. And if we look hard enough, even the stinking fish sings.

_________________________

The Orange Tree by Dong Li is available now via the University of Chicago Press. 

What I wanted
wasn’t to let in the wetness.
That can be mopped.

Nor the cold.
There are blankets.

What I wanted was
the siren, the thunder, the neighbor,
the fireworks, the dog’s bark.

Which of them didn’t matter?

Yes, this world is perfect,
all things as they are.

But I wanted
not to be
the one sleeping soundly, on a soft pillow,
clean sheets untroubled,
dreaming there still might be time,

while this everywhere crying

_______________________

From The Asking by Jane Hirshfield. Copyright © 2023 by Jane Hirshfield. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.