Monday, November 2, 2020

Isabella Wang : IX





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.