Wendy Xu

some days

 

 

Some days as I am laying about the house

 

Cultivating my laziness

 

I imagine a very sudden and mysterious wind

 

Visible because it has just blown through a glitter factory

 

Tearing through my living room

 

I throw myself in a protective style over the books

 

And I feel good and heroic about this

 

I feel that in a genuine disaster situation

 

Other people can turn to me

 

Because I am filled with courage

 

And a taste for self-sacrifice

 

This believing is how I am not dead day after day

 

It is how my voicemails to you are not filled with weeping

 

I don’t think we make art and give it to the world

 

I don’t think the world can stomach another bite

 

One of us must wear a golden hat with fringe

 

It flaps softly around your face in little circles

 

Some days I don’t understand half the things I say

neon pear

 

 

If today the goodbyes are incorporated against me

 

Then I feel a certain kind of flattered

 

That I am so dangerous in my knowing

 

I steal two magnificent neon pears from the cafeteria

 

Because good news is on deck today

 

From the middle of America that maybe I have been selected

 

For what I can’t be sure

 

But I am thinking now of my tribe and their necessary dispersing

 

Their large flat feet touching down upon the earth

 

Where they will judge things based on an ability to move

 

So tonight when I am dumped from the light

 

Into a gas station’s static buzz

 

That is OK

 

I will with some coaxing hear a song about it

 

Which can’t reach anyone outside of this blue room

 

Which if the birds believe in noise and pizza

 

I believe in pledging allegiance to the united states of your face

 

I turn off one ear

 

And then slowly the other as if to say Sorry

 

I am unavailable for the duration of this dream

poem with comparison

 

 

Often I confuse portentous with pretentious

 

Which is just how it goes with words

 

They are like slippery children shoving one another

 

Into an above-ground neighborhood pool

 

The blue of the water is the blue of the world

 

It is July and I am sitting motionless on my porch sweating

 

I regret my more eco-conscious decisions now

 

My neighbors bask all day in the hum of their air-conditioner

 

Kiss each other like cats

 

Meanwhile I am obsessed with putting my hand on things

 

To guess their weight by pressing and not lifting

 

That hot bronze statue in the center of town

 

Citronella candles abandoned outside the public library

 

I close my eyes now and see a bolt of pale green fabric

 

It would make an amazing set of curtains

 

So here I am skipping down the dark driveway to the car

 

I don’t need you for this part

biography

WENDY XU is the author of You Are Not Dead (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2013) and two chapbooks: The Hero Poems (H_NGM_N) and I Was Not Even Born (Coconut Books), a collaboration with Nick Sturm. Recent poems have appeared (or will appear) in The Best American Poetry, Gulf Coast, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. She co-edits and publishes iO: A Journal of New American Poetry / iO Books, and lives in Western Massachusetts.