I triple along cold water, moss, and poisonous rambum, drop down
my den at the sound of the hunter, who follows the gossip of a
sister tongue.   living matter   gift of this wilderness   I leap, then slither.

I divide. I watch our two suns with my binocular hearts. praise be 
to insides   the insides of others   Crouched in a grid-gray marsh,
I slobber at long-legged laws springing like fat lobes from their posts.

"The unseen is called" "inside," "your insides are" "alive." I change
as you taste me. One sun in my chest. I part the meadow before I 
tumble through it, sometimes years in advance. I prove the hunter alive, 

for he eats me. "The hunter was the first" "to translate your growls"
"and tome them."   in adoration   An iron throat in his hands,
crackling like a stomach   in thanks   I have three tails, two spines, 

and one end. He ravages me in dialect. "In the moments behind you"
"the meadow parted" "towards you" "running" "like a hunter."
from the book IMPASTORAL /  Omnidawn
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Like other poems from my book "Impastoral," "Whoso Hunts" experiments with how poetry can represent non-human beings. I did not have a specific creature in mind here—instead, I wanted lyrical, surreal langage to tunnel through the alien world of some unidentifiable poetic organism. Language and matter meld, so that—for instance—translation and predation become the same thing. Your "insides" can be your interior world, or your innards.

 Brandan Griffin on "Whoso Hunts"
Photograph of Cathy Linh Che
"Q&A: Cathy Linh Che of Kundiman"

"I wanted to create a workplace where people felt like they had enough time and space to write. If our mission is to nurture writers and readers of Asian American literature, it’s important to recognize that the staff, who are also writers and artists, are part of that community and deserve to be cared for."

via POETS & WRITERS
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What Sparks Poetry:
Erin Marie Lynch on Reading Prose

"My family's archive was haunting me. Or the archive beneath the archive, the archive against the archive. The archive that could be for us. I was trying to trace the movements of my ancestors backwards, from Oregon to Standing Rock to the Dakota homelands in Minnesota. I needed to find out whether my great-great-grandmother, Elizabeth, had been involved in the forced march following the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 and the following atrocities. And I needed poetry to understand the varied and various rippings and sutures of our people and our land."
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