Stupid Fucking Beauty
Add a few lines
against the shawl’s knitting.
Safer to attend to details.
Safer to comprehend loss.
Analyze your risks
when you open
your mouth. See
that deviled line flair
when the tongue does
what it does. Even in the night
your shadow finds the luxury
of a caesura – the weight
of attending to yet absent from
The experience. So, I kiss you
and tell you all the things that
assault me when
I want, when
I consult possibility.
That fucking blender,
your fucking hand,
electric cars, permaculture,
each green fig
plumping on the branch
owning the potential
of sweetness,
daring the proliferation
of an idea. Fucking fruit.
Shitty little promises
concentric in their red bed.
Stupid books that tell me about
the many ways sadness
can permeate a core.
Even in the metaphor
when I imagine those
precious little radicles
struggle from casing
to root, I hate it
because of the margins
where I see them fail.
Stupid little life.
Stupid fucking beauty.
Now, what can I imagine
for tomorrow, but you.
Dan Lau is a Chinese American poet. A Kundiman fellow, he is the recipient of scholarships and grants from The Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, Queer Cultural Center, and San Francisco Arts Commission. His poems have been published in Colorado Review, Bellingham Review, The Margins, Poem-a-Day, The Baffler and others. He resides on the unceded territory of the Ramaytush Ohlone, also known as San Francisco. (Photo by Bethanie Hines)
Editor-in-Chief Laura Lee Washburn is the Director of Creative Writing at Pittsburg State University in Kansas, and the author of This Good Warm Place: 10th Anniversary Expanded Edition (March Street) and Watching the Contortionists (Palanquin Chapbook Prize). Her poetry has appeared in such journals as TheNewVerse.News, Carolina Quarterly, Ninth Letter, The Sun, and Valparaiso Review. Harbor Review’s chapbook prize is named in her honor. She expects her next collection, The Book of Stolen Images (Meadowlark) to be out in a few months.
The Coop: A Poetry Cooperative 