Willie Lin
I died in my sleep last night.
Against this, I ask you to imagine a birch branch.

Shining white, a perch
for the moon stretched to a mask.

Or in place of the lie, imagine instead
persimmon trees, walnut trees, a black socket in the ground

opening into a wasp nest. Its madness
seeps into dreams like my acrid breath.

All the news is
of illness. I do not remember the name I took.

I mistook a branch's shadow on my arm for a bruise.
Like a held breath, the secret music of teeth climbs to where

there is no rest.

The stutter, stutter of hearse wheels against
the uneven winter road wakes the wasp in my pocket.

Its wings shutter like eyes
on my doll mask. They look at me, then past me.

They see what? An essential driftlessness,
recklessness. They shudder.

Pity the bruised persimmon, the green walnuts stitched
to my pockets, my nail-marks in the pith.

Too much reverence
is granted to the dead. I died

so I can say this. Tides mend the morning
and the rest of the day.

Why did the moon go mad? It heard the word once
and took it as its name.
from the book CONVERSATION AMONG STONES / BOA Editions, Ltd.
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In addition to being a consideration and explanation of a kind of
failure, this poem is an embodiment of one. I'd set out to write a
ghazal but strayed and failed more and more away from one in my
revisions. The form still ghosts the poem in ways now only I can see.
 
Photo of Hanif Abdurraqib
An Interview with Hanif Abdurraqib

"I think grief is also an occasion for gratitude. Grief is a feeling that is simply knocking at the door of memory repeatedly. Grief knocks and then if you are fortunate, if your memories are intact and alive enough, the door opens and then you get to revel in what is revealed through that door's opening. Grief arrives to me in many pieces."

via THE GUARDIAN
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Cover of Well Then There Now
What Sparks Poetry:
Juliana Spahr on "Gentle Now, Don't Add to Heartache"

"Humans do not show up until the eighth section of sixteen. The chant is enumerative, but not merely enumerative. In the list of flora and fauna that the Kumulipo includes, humans come after birds, bats, and fish and before octopus, coral, and eel. I know of almost no examples of a poem with such an ecosystem, such a hope, such a possibility, such a reminder. And if I had to start to try to figure out what poetry is in this moment of ecological crisis, I might start there."
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