the die-off is nigh, birds bombing from trees, red veins chronicled into the pavement—the flights of feathers writ fractal—ice the twitch of your body with an anathema on your wrist—the sky rolling open and closed, the dome lid of a silver chafer breathing steamclouds into the—lacrimosa dominae—when your father is a goose in flight—wingtips outstretched to slap your—shower regrets—water seeks and finds its own level—in the mist of an echo chamber—to wish like the gulls i could eat the sky, and wrap winds around my wrists to plunge through aerial silks.
Stella Wong is the author of Spooks, winner of the Saturnalia Books Editors Prize, and American Zero, selected for the Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Pcrize by Danez Smith. A graduate of Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Wong’s poems have appeared in POETRY, Colorado Review, Lana Turner, Bennington Review, Denver Quarterly, the LA Review of Books, and more.