That gray hut is where I first learned to swim. They pushed usthrough a gap in the floorboards. Dropped down a ropeto hold. It took us several panicked kicks to findthat we knew how to do it. Once under, our eyes adjustedto the salt’s burn and gleam. The fish did not care. They turned their long bodies and became something’s dinner. At home, toweled off, we ate from plates of tasteless crackersbought from the only supermarket with sides salt-fadedto white. The woman who owns it still lives inside. She has no sons; the fish she sells comes frozenin boxes from the mainland. I once saw her crouchon the jetty at dawn and place a basket into the water,raise it again full of leathery fish flopping against her arms.She gutted them. They were so small. I watchedher toss what was left of them back to the ocean.
Returning to the Village
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- November 26, 2024
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“Returning to the Village” from Survived By: An Atlas of Disappearance by Stephanie Niu.
Published by Host Publications in February 2024.
Copyright © 2024 by Stephanie Niu.
Originally appeared in Plainsongs, Winter 2023.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Nicholas Nichols
Stephanie Niu is a poet and writer from Marietta, Georgia. Her first full-length poetry collection, I Would Define the Sun, won the inaugural Vanderbilt University Literary Prize and is forthcoming in February 2025. She is the author of the chapbooks Survived By (Host Publications, 2024), and She Has Dreamt Again of Water (Diode Editions, 2022). Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, The Missouri Review, Literary Hub, Copper Nickel, Ecotone, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Full of lament and wonder in equal measure, Stephanie Niu’s poems are maps that guide us to a place of intimate attention where we can hold what is most vulnerable and tender on this planet, to better understand what has already been lost and what is currently at stake. These poems collect fragments of memory to shape an archive of things lost—from the fleeting raptures of childhood to the species nearing and beyond extinction.
An “atlas of disappearance,” Survived By animates extinct, endangered, and recovering species of Christmas Island, a remote Australian territory, through visual poems that chronicle the extinction crisis without relenting to its abstraction. Scientific language intertwines with the lyric, and in this fusion “the known easily becomes strange.” Even the language of scholarship morphs under Niu’s microscope—depth becomes death, then knowing, when names of deep-sea creatures are spoken aloud into something small enough to hold in our hands.
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