You visit me in a dream after passing,
after I’ve been awaiting you for weeks,
because Chinese belief teaches us our
loved ones will appear when we’re asleep.
It’s real when I enter the hotel restaurant
in the middle of nowhere town I live in,
as the Midwest architecture transforms
into Kowloon at evening time. We eat
bird’s nest soup, and I remember the time
my father ordered me this four-hundred-
year-old delicacy at Hong Kong airport.
Out comes the Peking duck, and I ask you:
“Why did it take you so long?” You answer:
“I arrived once you were strong and ready.”
2024
Regular
Contemporary
2025
Death & Loss
Food
Intersectionality & Culture
Poetic Form
Dialogue
conversation between two or more people as a feature of a book, play, or movie
Elegy
a meditation on death, often in thoughtful mourning lamentation
Iambic Pentameter
a line of verse composed of five iambs– an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable (u / u / u / u / u /) commonly used in the Renaissance period
Sonnet
A poem with fourteen lines that traditionally uses a fixed rhyme scheme and meter.