Mad Honey Symposium

Sally Wen Mao

• Publisher: Alice James Books
• ISBN:
  9781948579971
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

"Like Sylvia Plath's poems, these visionary poems are not only astute records of experience, they are themselves dazzling, verbal experiences. Worldly, wily, wise: Mad Honey Symposium is an extraordinary debut."—Terrance Hayes

"[ Mad Honey Symposium ] has all the delicacy of [Mao's] earlier writing—but now there's also a gritty, world-wise sense of humor that gives her work heavyweight swagger."—Dave Eggers

Mad Honey Symposium buzzes with lush sound and sharp imagery, creating a vivid natural world that's constantly in flux. From Venus flytraps to mad honey eaters, badgers to empowered outsiders, Sally Wen Mao's poems inhabit the precarious space between the vulnerable and the ferocious—how thin that line is, how breakable—with wonder and verve.

From "Valentine for a Flytrap":

.........................There's voltage
in your flowers—mulch skeins, armory
for cunning loves. Your mouth pins every sticky
body, swallowing iridescence, digesting
light. Venus, let me swim in your solarium.
Venus, take me in your summer gown.

Sally Wen Mao was born in Wuhan, China, and grew up in Boston and the Bay Area. She is a Kundiman fellow and 826 Valencia Young Author's Scholar. Her poetry is published or forthcoming in Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, Hayden's Ferry Review, Indiana Review, Passages North, Quarterly West, and West Branch, among others. She holds a BA from Carnegie Mellon University and an MFA from Cornell University, where she's currently a lecturer.

Searching for the Queen Bee

Outlast, outgrow, outshine

all midnight, all opposition.

For sweat & fists don’t silence

you, but the gridded landscape

does. Go ahead, run to the garden

where childhood sinks inside

the lake’s lips. Wash your face,

its dark adult spot. Believe

in the dawn behind the giant

tree, the light’s torn dress,

redress. If you’re tired

of fighting, how do you find

the Queen? She’s all appetite

and aplomb in runny regalia,

so moist you latch on. Life

is not dear unless coveted

things are claimed: the joy

of exploding queens crackling

in jaws, tougher than goat

and sweet thorns. Honey sticks

to horse manes, rat hide, pigeons

electrocuted on fences,

damp newspapers, headlines

explaining cruelty, cruelty.

Honey drips from glaciers.

May you never sleep, badger:

ever-droning, ever-hunting.

Hurling a Durian

This is the fantasy fruit: it can awaken

desires lodged deep inside a person

but stuck, like an almond clogging

the windpipe. The smell of a durian

may erase a child’s immediate memories.

So I am addicted, of course. Not to eating

but to sniffing it like glue, my fingers probing

its dry, spiked surface until they bleed

and I eat. But the feast disappoints

me because its taste replaces the corpse

scent with something sweet and eggy,

a benign tang I flush down with wasabi.

For there is nothing a kid like me

can do except awaken to loss and wish

for a seven-piece suit of armor. The desire

always returns: durian as a weapon of truth.

Even if I don’t know how to pull a trigger

or whet a knife, it’s tempting to imagine

throwing a dangerous fruit at the head

of the person who failed you, who hurt you,

who, for all these years, has tried to break

you. But this desire is lodged deep

for a reason: the pull of forgiveness

like a hopeless gravity, and always, I try

to resist. So I do by taking a spoonful

to my lips, savoring the smear, the din

of my cleaver hacking the husk, the juice,

the sweat ripping open the rind.

Monstera Deliciosa

I’m a monster because I poison the children.

They dance around me and my fronds flutter

with holes. They invite: Eat my fanged fruit.

Each scale will peel off easy, but if you eat it

unripe, it will steal your voice. Your gums

will blister little stars. You’ll vomit, swell, tremble.

When ripe, it is sublime. Better than banana,

soft mango, sweeter than wild yellow rambutan

coated in syrup. It only takes one year. Bite.

The Azalea Eaters

Mother begs us not to eat the flowers.

We scrape the pots for blubber. Fat

scalds our dreams, broils our sweat.

Softly, azaleas kill our hunger.

Because we believe in pink spadix,

the fragrance pollinates our tongues.

Before the farmers bulldoze them,

we smuggle fistfuls into our knapsacks.

Now we are sick but only as sick

as the river that fed us golden tadpoles.

The river is a gutted diorama: the dire

wolf, awakening, spits out teeth & fur.

In our retching, we summon the aphids.

We enter the malnutritive night.

Stag beetles & horntails

swarm the wax leaves, calm

the poisons in our too-hot

cotton mouths.

In our fevers, we summon summer.

Weevils swim the length of lake. Toads

tease us with their fat slime.

No water makes us believe we have gills.

Frogs hatch from fuzz. We pity their birth.

It’s the eleventh season of hunger. Ding dong,

belts the frog in the muck. Ding dong,

sings the salamander.

Fetal and feral, we curl

in our beds.

Fetal and feral, we drink

in the dusk,

hands da...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Note to the Reader
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Dedication
• I.
• II.
• III.
• IV.
• Notes