Wong May
What does China remember of Japan?
On Lugou Bridge you ask.
What does Japan remember of China?
On Lugou Bridge you want to know.

This is where it all started.

They say don’t count the stone lions
At the pier—
You will become one of them.
Stop counting
Stop!
Your eyeballs are turning stony, inward.

I bared my teeth in the mirror
When I got back to the hotel.
They still chatter.
Prolonged exposure to the Northerlies
On the bridge prises one’s palate.
But I did not roar.

A clever man in the last century
Wrote a fairly readable book
From Lugou Bridge to Pearl Harbor
(1937 to 1941). He reckons
A World War may begin many times
Before it begins.
We never tire.
You are not far off
One of the world’s true crime spots.

Are there secrets best kept in the War Museum
At Lugou?

Born after the War
I might turn in my parents,
In memory
Of their survival
In China’s war years.

“For your generation
The last world war
Was fought.” Yes, this will go on being said
Till the next generation
Born before the War

Has no one to say it to.

The late Qing Emperor left 4 words
On a stone pier:

“Dawn Moon
Over Lugou”
from the journal THE YALE REVIEW
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Cover image of Cynthia Cruz's book, Hotel Oblivion
The 2022 NBCC Award Winners Announced

Joy Harjo has won the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, while Cynthia Cruz was awarded the 2022 Award in Poetry.  Committee chair Rebecca Morgan Frank praised the latter poet’s "'curation of carefully staged snapshots of inquiry,' in which emerge such questions as: 'What is a body and how can it possibly contain us? How does a poem move through the fragments of memory, knowledge, and images we each contain?'"

via NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE
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Cover of Black Warrior Review, 48.1, where Oliver Baez Bendorf's poem was first published
What Sparks Poetry:
Oliver Baez Bendorf on "I Want Biodegradable Sex"

"I am often suggesting to students that when it comes to style, we each have a 'terroir'— a particular flavor made up of the unique places and vocabularies that we have absorbed....But the thing is that terroir is not only style. It is substance. It is not even quite right to say that it is also substance. It is exactly that, substance. It’s the matter we are made of. Terroir is what you write and how you write it. The goal is to write what only you could."
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