Ken Chen, “The Mansions of the Moon”

The crescent fattened, making content the anorexic moon.
Escapes the smog and eats the road, the moon winds up
our time and chews the road back into itself. The moon is
tattooed by black pattern of branch. The moon is shy
and hides like two people behind a silence and a pretense
of no emotion. It understands what it is like
to have one’s heart carved away in phases.
This is the price of being
other than lifeless.
An eyelid goes gibbous with water.
For a frozen moment, the moon
has sunk into a sphere, the perfect solid of memory—
all thoughts equidistant from the soul,
the thought-light focusing on
two humans together, growing alone.

Juvenilia was the winner of last year’s Yale Younger Poets competition, the oldest annual literary prize in the United States. It’s the debut collection from Ken Chen, the executive director of the Asian American Writers Workshop; he recently did a batch of readings around the New York City area, and he’ll be doing another on Saturday, May 15, at the New York Botanical Garden, sponsored by the Poetry Society of America.

4 May 2010 | poetry |

C.K. Williams, “Wasp”

Hammer, hammer, hammer, the wasp
has been banging his head on the window for hours;
you’d think by now he’d be brain-dead, but no,
he flings himself at the pane: hammer, hammer again.

I ease around him to open the sash, hoping
he doesn’t sting me because then I’d be sorry
I didn’t kill him, but he pays me no mind:
it’s still fling, hammer, fling, hammer again.

I’m sure his brain’s safe, his bones are outside,
but up there mine are, too, so why does it hurt
so much to keep thinking—hammer, hammer—
the same things again and, hammer, again?

That invisible barrier between you and the world,
between you and your truth… Stinger blunted,
wings frayed, only the battering, battered brain,
only the hammer, hammer, hammer again.

C.K. Williams will be reading from his latest collection, Wait, tonight at the Free Library in Philadelphia. Other poems in this book include “We” (published in Slate), “Dust” (The New Yorker), “I Hate,” and “Zebra” (both from Poetry).

Then there’s “Rats,” which Williams recited for a Big Think interview, after sharing his thoughts about global warming and the Bush administration…

(more…)

27 April 2010 | poetry |