Two Poems: Stella Wong

 
A closeup on a burnt orange, wooden wall. A window, framed in grey wood, is closed and padlocked.

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.

 

An older woman rides a bike down a street lined with colorful wooden buildings.

 

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.

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Two Poems: Stella Wong

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