june 8, the smiley barista remembers my name
Beauty on earth so blue, even the cheese flowers
a culture with no democracy... Yesterday (for example),
I ate the same sandwich I eat every week: eggplant
roasted in red pepper aioli, a focaccia jammed full
by arugula, capers sweaty in browned butter. How
have I come to love routine? I’m thirsty and abashed.
The fabric of my childhood underwear triple axels in the wind—wow.
The whole neighborhood watches me do emails, go to therapy: she shed
revenge for forgiveness. I said it, “i forgive you” slipping
like a key beneath a door, where never was a house attached.
Is it beauty on earth, so blue? Each side stalled, you are touched,
forstanding the sun. Its fat macula borne down grips
(i wish! i saw! i fear! i heard! i dream) like an emotion.
This is not a feeling. This can be, I think, a conversation.
Woo Chan
Born in Macau, Fujianese poet Wo Chan earned a BA at the University of Virginia, where they received a Rachel St. Paul Poetry Award.
In their poems, Chan often moves in several directions at once, engaging memory, identity, and the body. “Wo challenges binaries, questions the conceit of ‘normal,’ and examines the intersectionality of gender, sexuality, race, and otherness,” observes Emily Yoon in a 2015 statement on the Asian American Writers’ Workshop website.
Chan is the recipient of fellowships from Kundiman, Poets House, the Lambda Literary Foundation, Poets & Writers, and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. They served as a program assistant for Poets & Writers and a communications assistant for Kundiman. They live in Brooklyn and are a member of the Brooklyn-based drag alliance Switch n’ Play.
