for
John Thompson
Thompson,
I catch a great big fish for you;
the
trout, unresponsive as stone.
I
know you know:
poetry
isn’t just in the song of the grieving.
So
you are still here: the sky, the stove;
you’ve
left me with no good recipe to follow.
When
the days grow cold, I’ll be responsible
for
lighting my own poem; grove; trees.
After
Ghalib,
I
write in homage to all the women poets I know.
At
19, Isabella Wang is the author of two poetry collections, On
Forgetting a Language (Baseline Press 2019) and Pebble Swing
(Nightwood Editions forthcoming 2021). She has been shortlisted for The
Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Poetry Contest, The Minola Review’s
Inaugural Poetry Contest, and shortlisted twice for The New Quarterly’s
Edna Staebler Essay Contest. Her poetry and prose have appeared in over 30
literary journals, and are forthcoming in four anthologies. She is the Web
Content Coordinator and Editor for issue 44.2 of Room magazine.