You can’t defeat nature, you can only
work with it. Just as speculating
on a perpetrator’s motives —sex as
power, power as hard exercise
of a phantom sense
of impotence,
blah, blah, blah—is trackless, so too is
asking what does it want, it wants
far less than you or I could
ever envision
in our least released
lives. It means no harm.
It needs a warm
host. We invoke genre to accommodate
events terrible and intimate,
to give fleshly narrative to cataclysms
of globular dimension— private/public, macro/micro
—samskara, samskara, these fictions sizzling through
the World Wide Gap,
racist, replicant, and species-specific.
Anna Maria Hong is the author of Age of Glass, winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award and the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Poetry Competition; the novella H & G, winner of the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s Clarissa Dalloway Prize; and Fablesque, winner of Tupelo Press’s Berkshire Prize. Her poems are published and forthcoming in Colorado Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, The Hopkins Review, Smartish Pace, Poetry Daily, Poem-a-Day, The Best American Poetry, and Sonnets from the American: An Anthology of Poems and Essays. She is an assistant professor at Mount Holyoke College.
