As Though It Were a Small Child

Cynthia Dewi Oka

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 hereRead poems by selecting below.

What Keeps

Some nights We stay up
passing it back and
forth
between us
drinking deep

Read >

This Era

Forests and cities

along the way sleep like huge dark churches.

Read >

Talisman

each of us bearing the art
in a curve of wing, a small motif
of feather,

Read >

Rewind

Have you ever seen something that buzzes inside you?
I am watching two kids encounter each other

Read >

Rationale

Because she still won’t sleep alone, you sleep deeply
with her small warm body wrapped in your arms.

Read >

Pupusas

no, the pupusa is a portrait
            of this life, crusting & breaking
                        with every lick & tooth

Read >

Psalm III

in what language should I speak to you, sun
so you’ll rise tomorrow for my child, so you’ll
rise and stimulate the growth of our food,

Read >

Night Song

You’ll never know
what became of me
in the dark, how
my body opened,

Read >

Handfuls

Summer is a pure lone mountain.
Somehow, a winter flowers against an enormous blue loneliness

Read >

Eurydice

It snowed the day I died, a freak spring storm.
(It was in the papers.)

Read >

December

Instead of snow, a dark pouring rain
to dodge as passersby reject us.  No spruces, but sycamores with their white cankers.

Read >

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Headshot of poet Cynthia Dewi Oka

Originally from Bali, Indonesia, Cynthia Dewi Oka is the author of A Tinderbox in Three Acts (2022), a Blessing the Boats Selection chosen by Aracelis Girmay for BOA Editions; Fire Is Not a Country (2021) and Salvage (2017) from Northwestern University Press, and Nomad of Salt and Hard Water (2016) from Thread Makes Blanket Press. A recipient of the Amy Clampitt Residency, Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Prize, and the Leeway Transformation Award, her writing has been featured in The Atlantic, POETRY, Oprah Daily, Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, Hyperallergic, and elsewhere. An alumnus of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, she has taught creative writing at The Writers’ Program at UCLA Extension, Bryn Mawr College, New Mexico State University, Blue Stoop, Voices of Our Nations (VONA), and the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival. For fifteen years, Cynthia worked as an organizer, trainer, and fundraiser in social movements for justice. Based in Los Angeles, she is currently working on film projects and a collection of short stories.

Cover of The Journal

46.2

Columbus, Ohio

The Ohio State University

Faculty Advisory Editors
Kathy Fagan
Michelle Herman

Managing Editor
Hannah Smith

Poetry Editor
Amanda Scharf

The award-winning literary journal of The Ohio State University, The Journal contributes significantly toward the literary landscape of Ohio and the nation. The Journal seeks to identify and encourage emerging writers while also attracting the work of established writers to create a diverse and compelling magazine. The Journal has recently had poems reproduced in the Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies.

The Journal, originally titled The Ohio Journal, was founded in 1973 by William Allen of the English Department at The Ohio State University, and has been published continuously ever since. David Citino served as Editor from 1985 to 1990 and was a contributing editor until his death in 2005. Michelle Herman and Kathy Fagan became Fiction Editor and Poetry Editor, respectively, in 1990 and currently serve as Advisory Editors. The graduate staff has maintained The Journal’s commitment to publishing the best work by new and emerging writers around Ohio and the nation, including writing not easily classified by genre, excerpts from novels, longer stories, and other daring or wholly original pieces.

Over the course of its forty-year history, The Journal has published prominent writers such as Carl Phillips, Mary Jo Bang, John D’Agata, Denise Duhamel, Michael Martone, Terrance Hayes, Lia Purpura, Ander Monson, Brenda Hillman, D.A. Powell, Linda Bierds, Donald Ray Pollack, Maggie Smith, and Jericho Brown. The Journal is published four times annually: one print issue and three online issues.

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