Current
Issue
Volume 12.2
Ha Kiet Chau
—
Fènghuáng
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.
Ha Kiet Chau is the author of the poetry collection, Eleven Miles to June (Green Writers Press, 2021). She received an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and served as the co-poetry editor of Fourteen Hills: The SFSU Review. A recipient of the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program Scholarship and the Bernice Ruben Arnold Award, her work has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, and Best of the Net. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in North American Review, Ploughshares, NELLE, South Carolina Review, and The Margins. Ha currently teaches art & literature and is a judge for the 2026 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate. Her YA novel in verse, Darling Winter, is forthcoming from Mouthfeel Press.
