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Lo Kwa Mei-en

FROM the alien crown

 

                                                                                1.

At a phone’s burble, I feed bliss to a gilded house. Will I shrug off the biz,
zipping up my dossier? I, too, have acted as an America.
Business class is a gas planet and there, there is fantasy
yesterday, anti-exploitative explosives + the anti-reflective overdub
cutting weeping. In every nook, a December tomato, breathing like wax.
Xtra O2 will freshen up this intergalactic
drunk + reissue to me the New World, a ball a boy threw,
won’t it? Children fed to the well feeding the world
enter its registry or no safe thing—no ID, no house, on TV
violins for you + you, but not you. Daily racism has no face
for the head went in the jaw unhinged. When did you
underline the volta of justice, not the joke? Do I live if my roof
groans over a filthy cosmos of gold in the basement?
The reverse of the universe is going around and around on the ceiling.

                                                                                2.

The reverse of the universe is round, a ground with a ceiling,

               girls who petition at the exit, 
               girls who immigrate, girls who must

sip a sip of blood so white roots may put down a pink hush.

                Honey in a foreign girl’s roar is the key to auto
                -fable, and here be lions

rented by liars in the suburb of a white man’s room, the orbit I 

                irradiated. The end of eternity is an adequate poem 
                with an owner

quickly pulling it shut. He rapes a language for a word ending in J,

                joking constraint, and for content 
                pillages the archetype of a village,

picks his destination—a trick of a spinning prick. Let’s not look

                kindly on it, but in the end be kind
                of honest: most fantasy is a pale loop

on recall. In this book, the bees make money in the lion’s fontanel,

                licked away by the hero 
                in tacky sheets of zero.

Next chapter in, we girls spit it all out. The end is gold and harm

                mercurial, and the sea, ashine with
                milk and honey, and the sky, amen.

 

 

elegy on earth

 


Zoology counts us in (even in the –aughts) as against them
and against joining them, as not a fair choir but chimeras in

yellow moods, like a feral cat burying her fleas in the usual
bassinet; the overstretch of white geometry; the itching O;

xenocracy endangerous, for our alien tic is a diamond kick
cocked to outrun a calculus of human cocks, to go to sleep

worse and pray our sons be wild. In every history white raj
decorates himself like a laser-cut oath. If a vow has an IQ

victory is color-blind so he can’t “see” the body in the lazuli
evening gown, “can’t” imagine home in a biome of civil war

unless alienate women stimulate him to a maximal, toxic gush.
Future-feeder he. We were the old world but nothing is unless

terror blossoms a fist a cage force-fed, concentric rage a lung
grown in a meathouse, he a heart-shaped steak and we the root

sprouting a wing—watch for movement, a bomb of life. So if
holidays salivate all the king’s lions get in line, the impromptu

reverie regarding the gift of nature and the nature of gratitude;
if beaten with lust, we love else else our stripe flash on the TV,

questionable as a mouth of sand, bitter like a mouth of meat—
just like that, the cage door swings and flattens at the window

penetrated by arousal, and frames the nation as basically basic,
kings that flip the sodden cash of muscle as we unfarm our sex

over the wreck and the troubled, double helix of man—just a dab—
loitering here, a dear, glowing smear in the cavern we know why

no civilized road goes near. When we die, feed us to the flora
met in trenches. The germ may be forgiven, the bloomy bloody fuzz.

 

 

 

 

Lo Kwa Mei-en is the author of YEARLING (Alice James Books 2015), winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize. Originally from Singapore and Ohio, you can find her in Cincinnati and at www.lokwameien.com.