By Wendy Xu
Distrust this season breeds
in me whole
blue worlds, am second
to leafy nouns,
pinned back darkening lip
of the night,
untrustworthy sidewalk glazed
and sleeping there,
peachy trees, a line drawn from one
brow of a star down
and planted, each pillow
little shimmer, little wilt startled
from out the arranging field
moonlit pale behind
no foxes, in me finding the fragrant
new crisis, not dead still
where I love you in feast
and pledge, worlds rolling first
on crookedly
and on.
Source: Poetry (December 2014)
Poet Bio
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Born in China, poet Wendy Xu was raised in New York and Iowa. She attended the University of Iowa, where she earned a BA, and she completed graduate studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Founding coordinator of the Younger American Poets Reading Series, Xu co-coordinates the jubilat/Jones reading series and has served as an editor for iO: A Journal of New American Poetry and iO Books. She lives in Brooklyn. Xu frequently uses line breaks as sharp hinges in single-stanza, meditative poems that embrace the ephemeral nature of intimacy.
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