my love overflowing for you i saw the future: each star alignment
would leave me empty-handed still, i turned towards you kneeling, i raised
my palms to the sky my beseeching hands, unfolded
in benediction, hands never close into a fist what lands upon our trembling fingers
can always lift off and leave us my faith was wrong it once thought ecstasy
was the image of god in which we were made i know now that image was pain
the way i look at you the same way god must have looked at adam
and saw the future: a back turned from an outstretched hand god and i—
the same fool both knowing that we will come away with nothing having given everything our
hands reaching towards you anyway
and what do i get to keep?
Kimberly Nguyễn is a Vietnamese-American diaspora poet current living in New York City. She was a recipient of a Beatrice Daw Brown Prize for Poetry and was a finalist for Frontier Poetry's 2021 OPEN and New Poets Awards. Her work can be found in diaCRITICS, perhappened mag, Hobart, Muzzle Magazine, and others. She was a 2021 Emerging Voices Fellow at PEN America, and she has a forthcoming collection in Fall 2022.