What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In the first series, The Poems of Others, our editors pay homage to the poems that led them to write. Each Monday's delivery brings you the poem and an excerpt from the essay. 
Marilyn Chin

   Border Ghazals
I.

I hate, I love, I don’t know how
I’m biracial, I’m torn in two

Tonight, he will lock me in fear
In the metal detector of love

Rapeflowers, rapeseeds, rapiers
A soldier’s wry offerings

He will press his tongue
Into my neighing throat

I can speak three dialects badly
I want you now behind the blue door

In a slow hovercraft of dreams
I saw Nanking from a bilge

Some ashes fell on his lap
I’m afraid it’s my mother

The protocol is never to mention her
While we are fucking

II.

The bad conceit, the bad conceit police will arrest you
Twin compasses, twin compasses cannot come

Your father is not a car, not a compass and not God
Though he vanished in his sky-blue convertible Galaxy with a blonde

He kept crawling back to us, back to us
Each time with a fresh foot mangled

One emperor was named Lickety, the other named Split
Suddenly, the soup of chaos makes sense

Refugees roaming from tent to tent to tent, looking for love
The banknote is a half note, an octave above God

O the great conjugator of curses: shit, shat, have shut!
I have loved you both bowl-cut and shagged

There are days when the sun is a great gash
Nights, the moon smokes hashish and falls asleep on your lap

Sorry, but your morphing was not satisfactory
Shapeshifter, you choked on your magic scarf

III.

I heard this joke at the bar
An agnostic dyslexic insomniac stayed up all night searching for doG

The prosperity sign flips right side up again
The Almanac says this Ox Year we’ll toil like good immigrants

Horse is frigid. Mule can’t love
Salmon dead at the redd

One leg is stationary, the other must tread, must tread, must tread
The Triads riddled him, then us

What is the heart’s past participle?
She would have loved not to have loved

I bought you at the corner of Agave and Revolucíon
You wrapped yourself thrice around my green arm and shat!

A childless woman can feel the end of all existence
Look, on that bloody spot, Chrysanthemum!

Shamanka, fetch your grandmother at the bus stop
Changeling, you are the one I love
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"After a long hiatus from school, I was working on a Master’s in literature, and just beginning to write poems of my own, when I first read Marilyn Chin’s Rhapsody in Plain Yellow. This book, with its densely allusive fabric, hyper-vivid imagery, and wild formal range, opened up my idea of what poetry can do. “Horse Horse Hyphen Hyphen,” which I wrote about extensively in my thesis, is one of the central loci for all the concerns of the book..."
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Front page of The New York Times reporting the moon landing
Fantastic Voyage in a Poet's Words

A half century ago, Archibald MacLeish, three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, playwright and lawyer, served as a literary interpreter of events beyond the imagination of most observers. "It seemed to me that the question to reflect about was what this great event was, this world-shaking event that held everyone’s attention," MacLeish recalled. "Was this simply a triumph of technology, the latest best piece of hardware, or was it something more?" 


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