afraid as a cooper
peels prayer
after freighted, fraught prayer
rug to expose
a beating cavity
under poetry’s horse-brown floor,
rewind to
the spirited weave.
how delicate the hand
I work. warp, weft, I
hold you in tension,
knot, stitch, I pause
you, star, vine
motif, I note you, the open
field. the tree of life.
Stella Wong is the author of SPOOKS, winner of the 2020 Saturnalia Books Editors Prize, and AMERICAN ZERO, selected for the 2018 Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize by Danez Smith. A graduate of Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Wong’s poems have appeared in POETRY, Colorado Review, Narrative, Lana Turner, Bennington Review, the LA Review of Books, and more.
