By STELLA WONG
Photos courtesy of Gandalf Hernandez.
The magnetic North Pole, Northern Canada
dramatic monologue as Bebe Barron
the seals dig their pups
breathing holes known
locally as aglus. who came up
with this, I can’t know. we read into cybernetics,
we read into communication
in the animal
and the machine.
gear, antipode, in
-verse, arctic seals find each
other through ultrasonic
vocalization. a kind of self-
regulating. you are no servomechanism
for which, I stay
tuned.
Småland, Sweden
field notes
turnout is the
wandering in
-to the fields post
winter. freighted.
the Swedish red
and white dairy
cattle crossed the
red pied (now ex
-tinct) and ayrshire
(also all gone).
swaying fairy
red with cargo.
nation built, spent
in what was known
as mellanmjölk,
middle milk. one
and a half per
-cent. read this more
like a torso
than an entire
-ly finished poem.
Stella Wong is the author of Stem, forthcoming from Princeton University Press, Spooks, winner of the Saturnalia Books Editors Prize, and American Zero, selected for the Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize by Danez Smith. A graduate of Harvard, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Columbia, Wong’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Colorado Review, Lana Turner, Bennington Review, American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, and more.
