Current
Issue
Volume 12.2
Show Contributors
July Westhale / Jess Yuan / Nico Amador / Sarah Lynn Hurd / Flora Field / Jennifer Moore / Maria Picone / Nichole Turnbloom / Silvia Bonilla / Morgan L. Jenkins / John Fadely / Sarah Brockhaus / Keith Woodruff / Cecelia Hagen / Austin Segrest / Angie Macri / Joannie Strangeland / Rayan Al-Awar / Emily Adams-Aucoin / Miriam Milena / Catherine Broadwall / Ashley Vogel / Ha Kiet Chau / Clayton Adam Clark / 2025 Michelle Boisseau Poetry Prize Winner: Isaac Salazar / Runner Up: Alexa Doran / Finalist: KT Herr / Finalist: Ellen Kombiyil / Finalist: Arlene DeMaris / Finalist: Isaac Salazar
Ha Kiet Chau
—
Fènghuángl
Pages and pages of poems drift across centuries
of thunder, descend in Du Fu’s lap.
Puffing opium by a peach tree, he torches my couplets,
engulfs my words in flames.
At the Great Wall, we split a thousand-year-old
preserved egg, banter in verse about peculiar weather:
ethereal snow and windswept autumns
as pages and pages of syntax swirl, desire butterflying,
水 and 火 burning timelines and seasons
shrouded in perpetual darkness.
Still, I bloom, I moonlit, and when he refers to me
as his rare phoenix, his Fènghuáng—so smitten,
I die not in heaven, but in Zen, in fifth dimension,
wings flowering over Tang Dynasty.
Bio Copy here
