I attend to the snow, hour after hour, marking where light
prunes its borders until an antelope appears out of the grass
below, a yellow-green leap, misshapen in the eye then
corrected in the mind because this is the immigrant’s work,
isn’t it, to see what isn’t quite there yet, or any longer.
To hold on, then, to what cannot be called truly an image, or
a memory, but something more vivid, less accurate, a stomach’s
gurgling in the dark, that organ to which neither music or language
belongs. I wake up these days, a new mother again, watching,
waiting, to understand what to offer, how to serve, by which I
mean, organize my body around what cannot be spoken. It’s not
that there aren’t countless names for it, antelope being just
one of them, something you might recognize, too, if only from
the haze of afternoons spent once upon a time, innocently, with
the Discovery Channel or at the zoo, where the foreign and exotic
that have only power to survive but not to touch you, perform
themselves at scheduled times with either bared teeth or hula-hoops.
I had meant, of course to write a poem about love, but I keep
getting stuck on its conditions. For instance, it is below zero
again today. I put my walls down and the snow blows into
my mouth, so when I say I love you, I love you, I mean, take
what I have been given. It is not one way. I will swallow your
estrangements, too. I’m not afraid. Tomorrow an antelope might
be a glacier, a book stitched of the heart-bursts of hummingbirds.
What Keeps Us
Poems to Read in Community
Inspired by C. D. Wright’s poem “What Keeps,” we offer Cynthia Dewi Oka’s “As Though It Were a Small Child” as part of a twenty-poem selection from poems we’ve featured in 2024—poems, like bread, that one might pass across the table—to a loved one, or to oneself.
Read editor Lloyd Wallace’s introduction to the collection and statements from our staff readers here. Read poems by selecting below.
Throwback Night, Midway Skating Rink
The sun dipped already, but we sweating, edges ribboned under
summer’s breath.
My Father Walks Out of an English Book and Into an English Field
It was not long after the war—
and just saying after the war places him
Half-Life in Exile
I’m forever living between Aprils.
The air here smells of jacarandas and lime;
Country Song (Memory of Rain)
A bruise is a promised haunting.
“Come, just this once,” I ask, disingenuously. I mean “a thousand times.”
At the Gellert Baths, Budapest
Here in the body museum,
women speaking Hungarian
rinse one another with buckets of water,
As Though It Were a Small Child
I wake up these days, a new mother again, watching,
waiting, to understand what to offer, how to serve, by which I
mean,