Driving by that yellowed building, I made only the phonetic connections to English: the lobes of honeycomb in my chest, threads sprouting their moon-fruit on forest floors, dead trees. Had I looked closer, I could have seen that even lung is connected by its rhizome to light, as in little weight, lift of a bird's hollow bones. The gasp of fung might have felt less toxic if I'd recalled fewer toadstools, thought instead of the buttons sliced atop my pizza, the wood ears in my mother's mu shu. I might— if she'd still been talking to me, if I'd taken the time to meet the owners of that whistle-stop restaurant—have discovered that Fung is a Cantonese variant of Feng, meaning phoenix—or more precisely, fabulous Chinese bird. How I want to claim that sense for the myth that was my mother, her fiery wing, how she burned down every inch of herself to make a new life in another place, far from family, how I still turn the dust and grit of her ash upon my tongue. I don't know, though— and won't—what strokes composed the script with which she wrote her character, which tone inflected that single syllable. Now I'm left to guess whether I'm descended from wind— that imperceptible hand fit to caress and blast and damage— or offering, body given up again and again to make seven children. Or am I kin with the more common gallop, pace at which she raced from her own birth in the year of the horse, each stride with her feet in the air, breakneck and broken? This name she once wore is no password, will not unlock my secret questions. I am left with this identity bestowed careless as hot breath on my neck, as the swift lone sylph that rises, vivid and violet, from the branch beside my window, where once more I dash after facts, after truth, where I dig for answers and come up with just the same old shovel busted against the same old root.
TODAY, @ 7-30 pm, ET Join Poetry Daily Editorial Board Member Phillip B. Williams in conversation with Editorial Staff Keene Carter for an evening of poetry.
MacArthur 'Genius Grants' Announced Poets Hanif Abdurraqib, Reginald Dwayne Betts and Don Mee Choi all received MacArthur Fellowships this year. "'As we emerge from the shadows of the past two years, this class of 25 Fellows helps us reimagine what's possible,' said MacArthur Fellows managing director Cecilia Conrad." via NPR
What Sparks Poetry: Martin Mitchell on Ellen Bryant Voigt's Messenger "She is a poet of control and precision; across decades and amid differing poetical movements, Voigt is steadfast in her adherence to a clear-eyed iambic elegy—an elegy defined most strikingly by her devotion to unsentimental self-interrogation and her equally unflinching assessments of public life."
