Ang Shuang (b. 1994)

SELECTED POEMS

Poems Translated for My Lover

My lover asks me what my poems mean.
I laugh & say try harder, so he pries
my lines open & sticks a hand inside.

Look at him crouched over a metaphor,
fingers rooting blindly in the dark,
the way one might hunt for a lost thing

rolled beneath the dense body of a bed.
Sometimes he pulls out one word & holds it
against the light of my life, squinting

as if he is willing my poem see-through.
For so much of my life I had believed myself
transparent, by which I mean easy—

my desperation serrated yet unsubtle,
my hands hungry for more hands.
Now I watch my lover fashion a hook

out of a hanger & realize maybe this
wasn't what my father meant when
he told me to be harder to get.

Lover, there is nothing to get.
I write about the same three things
& call it a collection. I name

loss as it leaves me & act like it was
my invention. Lover, I use the word
hungry too many times when what

I really mean to say is: so shameful
it's disgusting. Sometimes I say things
just for the serrated sound of it—

but you know that already.

by Ang Shuang
from How to Live With Yourself (2022)

 

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