In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The Body with an Elegy Inside of It, and: Left to Those I Love
  • Lo Kwa Mei-en (bio)

The Body with an Elegy Inside of It

In time, we’ll lose another heart -ful of what made the missive figs grow fat as a love-word rounding a lip & finite as the body addressed. No matter

how hard. If your name has lodged like a sickle beak in a fist-body of fruit what do I answer to. I’m awake & a vehicle, though not readily. I know because

what’s inside me takes off. How light will my bones get, down in the plot, & what company will they learn to keep. Where will you be. Look, how morning’s

strange birds freak & stain like a smashed cup. It’s a mourner’s reversal & the dark just pours up. See what’s left to see in this hollow, it says, naming itself, nodding, refusing

to sleep. Or release. Or come home. [End Page 34]

Left to Those I Love

To the geese: Every egg the neighbor shook as you slept. The bones and balls and chords to hiss: Get off me, fucker. Freedom. Freedom. For my very first executioner:

A searing blade of grass. An open eye. Just once. To Christ and our father: Our last night together, on my knees until sun-up. Sometimes I miss that. Eight years’ penitence and rue

(which I seem to have paid elsewhere). To Elia: Our children. Their children. Nyet. I don’t want to carry them any longer. I unleash the lot of us into the arcana

beside the unforgivable: My tiny pot of war paint. My old masters. The sunflowers yawning wild through the open window as a train discards one country for the next.

The blueprint, to no one, that caught the blow of the wind and bolted off with what was promised me—utter loss, and at some point, levitation. [End Page 35]

Lo Kwa Mei-en

Lo Kwa Mei-en lives and works in Columbus, Ohio, where she is a student in The Ohio State University’s MFA program. She teaches and tends bar. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ninth Letter, Crazyhorse, Indiana Review, The Cincinnati Review, and other journals.

...

pdf

Share