Ba, Our Love is Thick and Slow
- Ba, Our Love is Thick and Slow
and heavy, like cementpoured down a rabbit's warren.
Choke-love. Broke-love.It sprouts in a valley
of crumpled receipts.It peoples a fishing boat
and bleeds the Pacific.
Every word chamberedin our love's mouth
stumbles out as drunkand mispronounced
as our love. Bright thing. Brittle thing.There it sits, unblessed,
uneaten, farming dust on the family altar.
We even find it betweenthe drowning fish and
its pond—there is no softer collapsethan our love, no
suffocation as foreignor familiar. Between us, who is the
waterlogged body that breaksthe pondskin, scales full of moon?
Who is the moon? [End Page 163]
Steven Duong is an American poet from San Diego, CA and a student of English at Grinnell College. The recipient of a 2017 and 2019 Academy of American Poets Prize, he has poems featured or forthcoming in Passages North, Salt Hill, Poets.org, Diode Poetry Journal, and Split Lip Magazine. While he lives in Iowa now, next year he will embark on a year-long journey to Malawi, China, Thailand, and Trinidad and Tobago as a 2019 Watson Scholar, conducting a writing project titled "Freshwater Fish and the Poetry of Containment."
