poetry by Wendy Xu

**

Darker now in a new kind
of body, I go in fear
of metals, of what I would open
a mouth to say, colored
pumpkin-like or worse, I
am in a room, what happens
next: mostly melody, mostly reaching
back toward regret. Bleating
a white morning into sheets, do
the ferns panic when I do,
do necessary facts of anything
go on, here how doubly
light floats in
a bedroom. I would un-name
best practice slicing
the fruit, how like access, how
unsent the letters when inked
already. New ways stuffed
silhouette-like. New song
like almost heard.

**

I hold a telephone to an ear
from inside storm
unpreparedness. America is mostly
asleep, waking briefly,
forgetting itself again.

**

If a thing is caressed it is most
like instruments, like people
are bear traps. I posture
setting the table.

**

Like pieces, another smudge
of moonlight limps
itself down, like what heals
a person abruptly, a field, a plain
stiff chair. I have never taken
my time. I think my years thread
open into dark, in numbers, like who
are you to live
inside me. Who are you best
between a face flushed
up with light, like behind
moving teeth, the first gesture,
pink tongue of most
everything lost.

**

More or less failures heap
themselves, carrying a ring
of dust to bed, I sleep next
to everything.
More plainly I wring
my hands. I have had
enough access.

**

The new way is
the old way
wearing a hat.

**

Nobody is thinking
to thank you for this
extraordinary life, if moved
towards pieces it
is just convention, how
like nothing, you
taking notice, you saying
a color.
When I am away I bring
back updates.
Everything surges
closer. I imagine a body’s
own blindness.

**

Here now we begin
to rain, to be better arranged
inside a most
unfeeling space, I put
a red mark
on someone’s hand, someone
gives me the side
of a face. Crisped into
a new year, surely
as fuck we arrived.

——–
Wendy Xu