Franny Choi

Franny Choi is the author of several books, including, Soft Science (Alice James Books, 2019), Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014), and a chapbook, Death by Sex Machine (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). She was a 2019 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow and has also received awards from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts and Princeton University’s Lewis Center. Her poems have appeared in the New York Times, the Nation, the Atlantic, Paris Review, and elsewhere. She co-hosts the Poetry Foundation’s podcast VS (it’s pronounced “verses”—get it?) alongside Danez Smith and is currently an Arthur Levitt, Jr. Artist-in-Residence at Williams College. Source

Celebrate Good Times

The regime is having a birthday party, so we turn off the lights

and pretend we’re sick. All night, happy americans

honk their horns. We did it! they scream into our window.

In the morning, We is all over the floor. We sweep We

into a paper bag and label it EMERGENCY. The good news

is that things will go back to the way they were,

which is also the bad news. Meanwhile, I cut

an onion, and it’s onions all the way down, and that’s a fine

reason to cry at the sink on a Monday after the empire

congratulates itself on persisting again. No, thank you,

I’m stuffed, I couldn’t possibly have more hope. I haven’t finished

mourning the last tyrant yet. I haven’t said enough

goodbyes to—oh, what was her name? And hers?

How many We’s did they cut out of me? And whose country

was I standing on, the last time we survived?

Published:

2021

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2025

Themes:

Poems of Place

Politics