And Then It Was Less Bleak Because We Said So

Today there has been so much talk of things exploding

into other things, so much that we all become curious, that we

all run outside into the hot streets

and hug. Romance is a grotto of eager stones

anticipating light, or a girl whose teeth

you can always see. With more sparkle and pop

is the only way to live. Your confetti tongue explodes

into acid jazz. Small typewriters

that other people keep in their eyes

click away at all our farewell parties. It is hard

to pack for the rest of your life. Someone is always

eating cold cucumber noodles. Someone will drop by later

to help dismantle some furniture. A lot can go wrong

if you sleep or think, but the trees go on waving

their broken little hands.

Wendy Xu

Born in Shandong, China, poet Wendy Xu was raised in New York and Iowa. She earned a BA from the University of Iowa and MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Xu’s collection You Are Not Dead (2013) was profiled as one of the year’s best debuts by Poets & Writers Magazine. She is also the author of Phrasis (Fence, 2017), winner of the Ottoline Prize, and The Past (Wesleyan University Press, 2021). Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2013, Boston Review, Poetry, A Public Space, BOMB, and was selected for a Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry by D.A. Powell.

Xu is poetry editor for Hyperallergic, and in 2014 she was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. She is a visiting assistant professor of writing in poetry and the New School and lives in Brooklyn.