By Jenny Xie
I was profligate like a floodlight to the sun.
Hoarded saccharine and toothmarks,
wanted only the thickest rhymes, two of each.
Full I was of promises I never intended to keep:
puckered laughter, lines to feast.
I let everyone who entered my life enter through me.
Demanded nonsense love and bodies that would ring.
Not to mention higher kilowatts
of creeping joy, more red in everything—
Jenny Xie, "Origin Story " from Eye Level. Copyright © 2018 by Jenny Xie. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org.
Poet Bio
More By This Poet
Rootless
Between Hanoi and Sapa there are clean slabs of rice fields
and no two brick houses in a row.
I mean, no three—
See, counting’s hard in half-sleep, and the rain pulls a sheet
over the sugar palms and their untroubled leaves.
Hours ago, I...
Abstract with Red Square
And there,
between clean walls
you assume
the position,
angled toward
the red squares
roiling
on her canvases.
Into the oils
of a new tense
she herself
days before
had dissolved.
There, impasto:
her mountain.
Trimmed down
to the first
seeing.
Tamalpais
at every pitch,
pistachio
patches scraping
against cobalt.
Edges opaque
until they refused.
Mountainous,
she, too—
which is to say
surfacing,
color latching
to the seasons
where meaning
rushes.
Of this...