Yearling

Lo Kwa Mei-en

• Publisher: Alice James Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781938584190
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

"Defiant and uncategorizable, Lo Kwa Mei-en's Yearling, with its teeming species, battles, and passions, read like an illuminated manuscript: mysterious, visceral, awe-full. Hers are some of the most enviable poems I have ever read, and herald Mei-en as the new standard bearer for innovative structure, terrifying acknowledgment, ecstatic statement, and, I daresay, beauty."—Kathy Fagan

Lo Kwa Mei-en's Yearling explores adolescence through a deeply moving and poignantly raw lens. As the speaker ages, so too does the poetry, creating laments for the loss of friendship, the loss of species, and sometimes the loss of humanity itself. Harsh, forlorn and yet effervescent, Mei-en's lyricism perfectly captures the ethos of youth in an unsure world.

From "Rara Avis Decoy":

Wild diamond rocking on the floor

of a predatory boat. Point & say sweet traitor
to the wood & water for wanting to be made

of both. My name is I know not what I am
as a country of mothers & fathers comes down.

They call me sleeping beauty. I dream I amin flight, body unfolding, folding, a bullet

wounding water again & again—the mysterious
love of a father & mother a two-barreled

gaze. The gun in my dream speaks my name& sees a beating vein. Takes aim—

Lo Kwa Mei-en is from Singapore and Ohio. Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, Guernica, the Kenyon Review, West Branch, and other journals, and won the Crazyhorse Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize and the Gulf Coast Poetry Prize.

III

Canis lupus familiar song of songs

Feed this to the neighborhood. To the neighborhood dogs

in heat, I say, the smallish stars hunting what the slow stars

unscrewed. They streak. They eat all the gravity on the block

& I bring it back. When I’m got, when she’s good, the omega

bitch rises up like a gorgeous, violet weed. She runs high like

an arrow unleashed. She takes her tail in her mouth. Accomplice

stars gnaw on the dark. This is how we want to make love out

at the fence—in fat grass, a hound at our back, knees rocked

& boxing a dent under a belled, red alarm of alien honeysuckle,

bodies folding out until huge fogs & landscapes that spell I, I,

I was prepared to die. So feed this to something fast. Pick me.

Down in the wings a hunting body paces like black honey &

I go down. This is how we want to feel against the cellar wall.

Once I died, in morning. But one thing composted. It was this.

So female weeds upset the asphalt like a broken wine, & wild

dogs butchered my heart & fled before it blew. They felt good

like god, like the body & its sex, forever pushing each other’s

heads down in the wave of heaven. Like hot milk, winter fruit,

gift of the magi, a mother’s white, Holocene breath. Some heavy

stars submit: down the street, to a planet’s core, unbelievably

quick. You needn’t feed yourself for nights like this. Can’t you

see. My heart’s a hotel & it’s full with hounds. At your poor

neck my alpha & omega will leave open a gospel of teeth. Last

book. First page. A red illumination to light the animal amen.

YEARLING AND ARMOR

I am here, at last, dressed in plain mustard and tiger,

carrying on with my fake claw and faulty calendar,

the old fetishes—spit and spice and sea—loaded

behind my teeth. Another year, another armor,

though I was told otherwise. Another way of speaking:

What if the body had been a spell and the confidant broke it.

Or a city, half-woken, and my comrade blazed it. Inside,

a voice prays for the bantam mouthing off at the anti-dawn

to silence or become other, entirely: firebird

feeding off ash, or a photograph of somebody

brave. What if my face had been a sign so I painted it,

time’s direction rolling back and back like a maiden’s

domesticating spine, and what the body had in store

for itself—potential seeds and starry cloves stacking the inner

shelf—was pulled into the mouth of the ocean. So on,

another city, new, almost. What if I knew I would pay

all for entrance, to be entranced, or else to almost

always be. And if I let hot ritual wrap its arms about me.

Then another, and another. And felt the body move again

like a mouthful of sea, or a yearling in the armory.

RARA AVIS DECOY

“You simply take a piece of wood and cut out everything that doesn’t look like a duck.”

—Currituck Sound carver

Call me darling on the surface.

Call me honey of the sound

all my fathers make as they welt

the skin of the lake. My name is hooded

diver on a string, little Red Head bastard.

I call my mothers down to eat without a sound.

They beat, beat, slant to water and stitch

feet to the reflection of feet. I’m a favorite

child of the gouge and the knife, the human

hand that makes a collar about the ruby

neck of my father. He and my other fathers

drove down through shallows like drill bits

and they came up silver. My name is the spoils

of thin flesh, the minnow’s salt eye

plucked clean for a mother. Call me game

over. Wild diamond rocking on the floor

of a predatory boat. Point and say sweet traitor

to the wood and water for wanting to be made

of both. My name is I know not what I am

as a country of mothers and fathers comes down.

They call me sleeping beauty. I dream I am

in flight, body unfolding, folding, a bullet

wounding water again and again—the mysterious

love of a father and mother a two-barreled

gaze. The gun in my dream speaks my name

and sees a beating vein. Takes aim—

PINNOCHIA SENDS HOME THE MANIFESTO

When I’m august I will wear you like a cat fur coat.

The smallest leather in the world. Like now, nothing

heavy will get in or out the eyes but you, you off a

chain. Now I’m so hard like a hand of coal you have

to a count of three. Three. Roll th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Note to the Reader
• Acknowledgments
• i.
• ii.
• iii.