Jane Wong’s poems can be found in places such as Best American Non-required Reading 2019, American Poetry Review, AGNI, and Poetry, among other venues. A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the US Fulbright Program, Artist Trust, the Fine Arts Work Center, Hedgebrook, and others. She is the author of Overpour (Action Books, 2016) and the forthcoming How to Not Be Afraid of Everything (Alice James, 2021).
How long I’ve dreamt of you, teenaged and long-legged, lying on our porch,
your mud-speckled sandals kicked off to the side, watching a tree slowly split
My dream daughter is chopping onions.
She has been chopping for hours, slipping
off the skin like tea-colored lingerie, slicing them
thinly like the rings of some beloved planet.
I found a black snake on the porch, its body so
still I didn’t dare breathe. Lungs arrested, I might
have left my body then. It was long, a rope I could
Double Dutch, a tilde underneath every word I try
to love differently.
0 Comments