Stella Wong
After being married to your sunburned childhood
sweetheart, the French Embassy, for xx years, you'd think a little
peace from backseat driving is finally deserved. But no.

The plinky harp of counterintelligence goes on in perpetuity.
I brought down the heavens on my husband for making me
run yellow lights. On my skin? During Beijing Opera season?

Every primordial rib and chaotic theory has been acid-etched
on the honeycomb disco of my Double Stuf chrysalis. Every enemy camp
stitched on my gloving cheongsam. Every code I passed,

and the male guards always let me pass. I ate good
jade in the clothes of a lowly peasant cabbage and flossed
with archangel's gut and brass. I used no drugs or prophylactics

to fascinate both men and women. For two decades we were strung out
like paper lanterns, or vintage rice parasols. Love is sending us
up with no other forms of protection. I have that oyster grit but you,

the suicidal thoughts of a meat cleaver. I hit that
concubine's high note first and dragged myself out
long as the molting west was bottle green. Stuntmen are wholly good

for two things: missing your redacted's birthday and
bombshelling Hong Kong orange. Nothing tells me what I was
and what they were didn't matter.
from the book SPOOKS / Saturnalia Books
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Cover on Don Mee Choi's book, DMZ Colony, under discussion
"The Scribbles, the Rubbish, and the Mirrored Words"

"Amidst the critique of imperialism and militarism—and their devastation and pollution on land, on lives, on language—Choi brings to surface the voices of those deemed collateral, or barriers, in a nation’s fight for sovereignty: the photographers (her father) who document history, citizens who disrupt government orders, and unnamed children who search for home and family."

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Cover of Maricela Guerrero's Book, The Dream of Every Cell
What Sparks Poetry:
Maricela Guerrero (Mexico City) on Ecopoetry Now 

"And this is precisely where poetry and poetic communion shelter me with hope without optimism; where, in the different languages inhabited by beings with whom I share the air and water of this planet, we come together in longing for and choosing another way of interweaving, of searching inside ourselves for new ways to reverse this disaster."
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