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  • I Haul a House Out of the Bay
  • Jane Wong (bio)

            There is something about digging my arms into mudas if I'm trying to find all the loves I've lost—dragging

            each burrowed foot, each ventricle in bivalves. How Itender the spit of the bay, murk trilling my arm hairs.

            The jutting claw of a crab eyes me from its windowlesshome. You and me both, I want to say. Mud buries in

            nail beds, my bending heart furnishes fat hulls throughweeds to sustain me—how my grandfather squatted

            as wide as a kite and dug to feed his children, the shellsringing along my mother's mouth otherwise songless.

            I pull clam after clam from the slumping earth and tossthem into a bucket, clanging a warning for those who've

            wronged us. The tide lulls in lopsided adoration. I haulthese houses, my eyes dripping with clams. Salt air slops

            along my gums. Punctuated with specks of sea grease,I bend to turn the earth again, the earth muscling against

            me. Each hinge, each ghost—opening. In the murky sloughof day, I grit and dig, singing our long decay to sleep. [End Page 41]

Jane Wong

Jane Wong's poems can be found in The Best American Poetry 2015, American Poetry Review, Agni, Poetry, and others. A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the US Fulbright Program, the Fine Arts Work Center, Hedgebrook, and Bread Loaf. She is the author of Overpour (Action Books, 2016) and is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Western Washington University.

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