Five Poems
It is Four Degrees.
On Concessions
Raw
Scouts
A Public Report
It is Four Degrees
This is how I picture it.
There is a field
that I would have drawn.
It contains several birds.
Some can see me
closing my eyes. There
time passes.
It takes one minute away from me.
It takes one from my parents.
It puts light where the branches should be.
I have erased a few branches.
I have erased your ankles.
I have recited nothing.
But some thank you
takes over my heart.
They see it on my face.
This field walks through me.
It weighs barely anything.
I thought I had gotten rid of everything.
But the field.
On Concessions
Concessions long
after the fact collect in the rungs
of the dish rack. Our moon dries them
from across the way, it adjusts as clouds
make room. Yet the precise way
to expect them strikes us as ignoble,
always has, so we file away what proper
adjectives and other things we can
between the distant gaps
in a long disinterested quiet. Old age. I prefer to be reminded
of the divisions, that we watched comedies too,
that each time we preferred different
endings. Someone must unlatch the gate
and lay them back up in the eaves, hinged to the earth in their own way. Maybe someone
also resigned to his own stories. Someone must be the servant
while you sleep.
Raw
Satisfy, satisfactory
diet. What is worse,
bombs or leathery interviews. But you
spend the money
politics aside. Deter
deter. Today the list
knows who you are. It is
a good fortune. It is
not an aphrodisiac. It is
a thistle. Deny
deny. Pull it apart,
teeth wise. It is
hideously glad for company. Damned, finally,
shrug. Anything to gain
sinks in. Outside a stain
sets. Lettuce, reassure
me. Abduct
abduct. It is
glad for company.
Scouts
It is the open season. We assemble trees
at an age for serving life. In the clearing
we have an audience. Like an ancient, familiar radio
two of us play tribe, the only creatures alive.
Come here. Light up. Like a trumpet I burst
out laughing. The better off we are. See our great cities flow
and collapse. Multiple happy
explosions rocket in increment.
The trees scoop us up in their mahogany arms. The flames
die out. Is it dawn? we howl. Think of then, we write.
A Public Report
Dear Sir or Madam:
Over the last 4 months
Austin, Mumbai, Portland
we never finished. December 12,
4:15 p.m., we presented
sufficient dignity and overwhelming
feeling. In a state
of developing
affair, we circled
emergency. We circled
our ability to respect.
Where our inclination
for nihilism had been, our presentation
was possessed with sophisticated
development.
We are good for the facts.
We opened our notebook
on the dotted line.
is a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. His first poetry collection, Anthropy, won the League of Canadian Poets’ Gerald Lampert Award and was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. He has published poems in The Walrus, New American Writing, and Fence. Hsu won a Humanities Exposed Evjue Research Award for establishing a creative writing community and GED tutoring program in a prison. He was featured in Heart of a Poet, a documentary series on the television network Bravo.