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2021 Academy of American Poets Prize

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Untitled Entries 1 through 3

by Vicky Phan

 

1 Your funny mother burns plastic in the New Jersey cemetery so your father can have an iPhone in the afterlife. Funny. Our Tinder hookup asks how we like to cuddle, and we guide his head gently toward our chest as a pillow, his arms encircling us like our child. His fiction fails him, like an empty mechanical pencil or a leaking detergent bottle or a lover who does not choose to love you. Your lover comes back in a coffin, with a vengeance, 2 Why is everything built to hurt? What does a soulmate feel like? 3 Ancient-thing: your yellow diaspora has washed ashore to bring me to you. They whispered I am because I feel, sent me to the bathhouse to repent — you carry your ancestors’ demonism in your teeth & your thunderous joints.

 



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