Tracy Quan : Two poems

 

Ophelia

 

Trek, pour.
   Just before

sunrise—
   motherless

currents
   descending.

Ancient updates
   blasting

barrels. Taken
   barefoot, lasting.

 

The Annotated Bee Gees

 

Saviors are so yesterday.
Scapegoats wield
the sickle, make socialites
of MFAs who never wore

Balenciaga to the gala,
multicarat rock to municipal
votes, or the real thing when
it was wrong. Had their five

minutes in high school, saviors
—not their moment.
Bludgeoning bent thumbtack,
scapegoat thing. Hammer

hitting nail until collaborator
springs. Scapegoats have
the metrics to succeed, mandate
to govern. Saviors stoke

invented need. But you, chevalier,
earned my damsel loyalty
in a kosher cafeteria—
Hudson River sunlight.

 

 

 

 

Tracy Quan is the author of three novels, including Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl, published by HarperCollins. Her poems have appeared in Love’s Executive Order, Los Angeles Review of Books, Newest York, Poets Reading the News, Addanomadd and Topical Poetry. She’s a contributor to Hustling Verse: An Anthology of Sex Workers’ Poetry (Arsenal Pulp Press). A regular guest on Hong Kong’s RTHK Radio 3, she currently serves as a juror for the New York City Book Awards. A new essay was recently published in Radical History Review. (Portrait of the author by Stanley Moss)