This selection, chosen by guest editor Samantha Duncan, is from As She Appears by Shelley Wong, released by YesYes Books in 2022.
For the Living in the New World
There are so many ways to explore a forest— over clover clusters, past skunk cabbages to a field where we listen for a ghost of song. The hypergreen periphery is the opposite of Los Angeles on fire. Any tree can become a ladder. These trees have too many branches, but it is not my place to revise them. I may be happiest improvising the language a body can make on a dance floor. We are just learning how female birds sing in the tropics. Spring insists we can build the world around us again. How has love brought you here? My head is heavy from the crown.
Shelley Wong is the author of As She Appears (YesYes Books, May 2022), winner of the 2019 Pamet River Prize. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, and New England Review. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Kundiman, MacDowell, and Vermont Studio Center. She is an affiliate artist at Headlands Center for the Arts and lives in San Francisco.
Samantha Duncan is the author of four poetry chapbooks, including Playing One on TV (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2018) and The Birth Creatures (Agape Editions, 2016), and her work has appeared in BOAAT, SWWIM, Meridian, and The Pinch. She lives in Houston.
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