Transmission from the Factory
Alarms go off when I’m online Obedience is on
Offer Sir, the doll I am is a fine ditz
But later, with you, she becomes my
-Self I’m blinking and blooming by
Computer nightingale The information is so rude
It doesn’t hurt The doll I am is a remix
Divining the feminine at the speed of data
In the end I swipe the dooming glow
Erasing the universe, and a breasted, lunar
Wave shatters to find a shudder on TV
Forget ardor, bro, and after that, armor—
For atoms stay and anthems go, beau
Glib gears reproduce my body in www but not
In world, not yet I’m the flesh market
Hell sent back for blinding it And say I did
Say it was a lark If I wake to bliss
In fact, I do not show my face Just
Feel that The wonder is the blister
Just gets bigger when I rip me off
Us The doll I am is a film rated Q
Kissing forehead for infinite hours in a finite
Plane Do I feel feeling Or fucking up
Lo, I burn on the shelf but it’s just light, less
Angry than anxious, my art I have no
Money but in a neutral machine that hones
On my mettle its slurry honey and on and on
Aubade for First-Generation Kids
Z-particles make a hive of the distance, buzz, buzz.
Young aliens leave a mother’s ship to translate the deadly
Xeriscape and live as citizens roll in the ideal rolodex,
Wander the earth as the hands of extinction fall asleep in a row.
Vents in the universe vomit the years, and boycott versus maglev
Usage takes years to argue with my parents in lieu,
Terribly, of a common habitat.
Space before us, space between—its excess
Regrets me, an identifiable object, and my face, a traitor
Quizzed by her own questioning. Q:
Pools of activity imply planning. Children in a kingship
Only obey when necessary. You thought you could undo
National knots. When? A: Alien
Maiden reporting for nothing, madman ma’am
Looking right through me. I cannot call
Kept at arm’s length the measure of sacrifice, making mock
Juvenilia of me, the offspring raised on wheat and OJ.
I wither down to poem what I cannot plead, a bouquet of narcissi
Hurting to be shaken at the sky. What hurts like a kilo of flesh
Grown quickly in winter in the year of gravid splitting?
First-generation kids crowd the blatant, alien fields of
Electric pollen. A mother’s yellow coat is a pheromone
Dredging the world’s distance in information’s cold-
Call home, and hope, or a scent half as tragic.
Bombastic as an egg in my mother in her mother’s womb
Am I awake. What time is it, ma? It’s me—bee-sting, little brava.
biography
LO KWA MEI-EN is the author of YEARLING (Alice James Books 2015), winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize. Her poems can be found in Black Warrior Review, Boston Review, Poetry Northwest, The Kenyon Review, and other journals. She is from Singapore and Ohio, and lives and works in Cincinnati.