Wend Xu
Summer 2024 | Poetry
Three Poems
LATE APOLLO
Double dose of sun through shade
On the television, lonely women
their interiority not quite right
At night it is a new country
Explosions blowing
faces into the sky once again
Yesterday’s news sways
to weird music on the lawn
Sun on a pink cheek
Before I say it’s gone
Remember
Drippy sounds coming from beneath the sink
make for compromised writing
All this I give to the poem
A fire-proof box
Even when I thought I was getting closer to
what I really wanted to say
Fuzzy-headed flowers growing from a sidelong crack in the terracotta
Blossoms in ‘Z’ formation
UNCLE WHO WAS HIMSELF ONCE A CHILD
The performance was above all a personal action
Not the carnation aspiring to rose, more
description necessary
Make it idiomatic, pragmatic, make it fit neatly
inside a closed fist
Useless otherwise to work at the world’s richest university
and study the power of love
The graph rising steadily towards X, the area
of which you and I are speaking
They decentralized this next part before I was born
Thus for a while it felt pointless
to identify inconsistencies in how one parent
attaches a different verb
to each finger, wiggling them
with optimism
in baby’s face
As if nothing was off about how Uncle’s chest measures time
His zones full of beeping green,
lines that zig and crash, How
did I end up here again, in the seafoam ward
with Uncle, heavy
with used words
Without grasp of the next
The air plucks a familiar tune
upon my knee
TWENTY FIVE LINES ON ORPHEUS OVERLOOKING THE WATER
Run rabid through the tops
of trees: her music
Faces the candle and it faces me
A genius lilting a gust inside the god
Music may emanate unprovoked
Summon,
then sound,
ecstasies from a different age
When she speaks I hear clearly inside
an order cascading into lines
Turning left
on 77th, a safety-pin prick reminds me yet
to better adore the mirror surface
of his truck’s
negligent ass
Even here
speak to me, please, you mania
of a god’s deliberation
lighted
from deep inside the word
In this whole world a woman
with a light touch seems
to snip
the thread’s question
Sings it through
Wendy Xu is most recently the author of The Past (2021), and Phrasis (2017), named of the 10 Best Poetry Books of 2017 by the New York Times Book Review. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, Granta, Poetry, Tin House, Conjunctions, Ploughshares, The New Republic, New York Review of Books, and widely elsewhere. She is assistant professor of writing at The New School, and lives in Brooklyn.