Theresa, I Miss You (Plan for Algiers)
- Theresa, I Miss You (Plan for Algiers)
Theresa, I miss you. The examiners ask me to elaborate.New mornings like the old ones, nothing letting go. Stuck in the waking hour and adjusting the shades obsessively.Turning to prose as if to the barricades. I fail to identify some aspects of the plan.I know it did bad things to some people. I know it looks like a plastic overlay on the landscape. I can tell youabout monumentality, but I cannot find the word brutalism. It's all the sameto me: cemetery, apartment block. A radiant city in my cheeks while modernists abet and abate. Pressing myself into the cornerhoping the chiseled wall will take me. It's my job, the guard says. To care about you.As the room consoled me badly, I thought: the unkindnesses are so realistic.This unmade vision they asked me to conjure. Each slab was stamped to show its proper place. It's heroic, they assured me.Should I not have brought you here, my love? I tried to retrieve you from my own shapeI was willing to leave behind along the way. [End Page 128]
Mia Kang is the author of City Poems (2020), a poetry pamphlet from ignition press. Mia was named the 2017 winner of Boston Review's Annual Poetry Contest by Mónica de la Torre, and her writing has appeared in journals including POETRY, Washington Square Review, Narrative Magazine, and PEN America. She is a Brooklyn Poets Fellow, runner-up for the 2019 and 2017 Discovery Poetry Contests, and finalist for the 2019 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. She has received awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Mil-lay Colony for the Arts. Mia is a PhD student in the history of art at Yale University, where she studies the contested rise of U.S. multiculturalism and its failures. Find her online at www.miaadrikang.com.
