Tuesday poem #4 : Hoa Nguyen : ANGEL GOING POW

Pansies    the yellow faced

pansies     bearded   & the robin

is a twerp 

    twirping in the Pear

Why do I say robins

are not my favorite?

Jays perch or pear     why jays

on strip-mall eaves   I hear

the sun 

            Do I hear sun?   I wrote

these lines after John Bell sees

We wondered together

whether the moon undoes the sun

like a pansy   

& the robin busts about

     eating worms

No this is not the start of something

North spring     it is spring    gawd

like a gob-smacked sip    etc

into spring wind

.  .   . 

            .  .  . 

PS

the continent is a mass

   both solid and rocky   a thing sung

and now also a detritus decayed

I can stand on it

and lament the lack

and the plastic bottle cap in the dead

belly of the young bird

(albatross)

Born in the Mekong Delta and raised in the Washington, D.C. area, Hoa Nguyen studied Poetics at New College of California in San Francisco. With the poet Dale Smith, Nguyen founded Skanky Possum, a poetry journal and book imprint in Austin, TX where they lived for 14 years. The author of eight books and chapbooks, she currently lives in Toronto where she teaches poetics in a private workshop and at Ryerson University. Wave Books published her third full-length collection of poems, As Long As Trees Last, in September 2012.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan