Nancy Woo

What Are You: Bridge

America is just another word for star being born. Little densities squeezed together under just enough pressure, the collapse of other worlds fusing. We think everything revolves around our empire, no, we are just new. When the old regime closed in on itself, they took a boat to get here. My Vietnamese friend told me in 8-year-old whispers that her mom had surgery to make eyelids. Tiny little things, puffs of cloud broken off into new space. My ya-ya’s beard was rumored to be red, remnants from colonial rape. The family tree stops there. On the other side, we fought in the Civil War, have a flag to prove it. My ex-boyfriend’s father told him to date whomever you want but marry a Jewish girl. On his death bed, his dying wish. That’s when that star died and formed gas clouds in my chest. My white grandma never cooked anything but macaroni and yelled at the TV for them all to go back where they came from. After everything they lost, my parents lost us in the divorce. California is a nebula. I know some white girls who choose to get screamed at for their black men by old stars still dying. Love is a symbol, mixed up as it is with the evolution of everything else. One thing I never needed to be taught was how to feel celestial. There is a lightness to not having a family. I draw down bridges wherever I go.

Reflection: Crossing Worlds

cold snap of bone, the pig’s leg breaks
rice steams over pork belly, hissing

I didn’t grow up near a river
but I know the silence of leaves

coal stoves heat scraps under straw roofs
cold migration to suicide factories

I see a bride in wooden sandals
a poet missing her in the forest

a great wall built by slave hands
and a child beaten by the fire

for crying too loudly, shush
there is always a war outside

that someone is protesting
a tank in a village, the emperor’s robes

and loud-mouthed innocence
almond eyes unblinking in the glass

Nancy Lynée Woo (Twitter: @fancifulnance. Instagram: @fancifulnance) is a poet, writer and community organizer who believes in the power of the arts to bring people together. In 2017, she founded Surprise the Line, whose mission is to spread the joy and necessity of creativity everywhere, one line at a time. Nancy’s “Asianness” is largely imaginative as she was disowned from that family at birth, but she’s pretty sure she inherited some psychic gifts from her estranged Chinese grandmother. Nancy is an MFA candidate at Antioch University, and the recipient of fellowships from the Arts Council for Long Beach, PEN America, and Idyllwild Writers Week. Her third chapbook, Good Darkness, was named a Semi-Finalist in the Sunken Garden chapbook contest with Tupelo Press. This poet’s work is often inspired by the magic and mystery of the natural world.