Stella Wong

ARS POETICA

your six pack like a wonder
bread peanut butter jelly.
your nose like a saltine cracker,

son of hardtack. your dad’s
heart attack at your age now.
your hair like a teddy bear

from the fancy toy store
with nutcrackers at the door.
your skull like the genre

that is toto from dorothy’s basket.
but in fact not toto. like the scottish
terrier. your face like an oblong fact,

an rectangle. like a secret service
agent but regular,
I think you a beauty when you wait for me

like a lamppost, solo and grim. your chin
you’ll never shave again,
not after the bermuda cruise ship.

how you clean up
the crossword in 1980s haberdasher
terms. you’re always scared

everyone’s looking at you
but can I just say,
I always am. isn’t that worse.

STELLA WONG is the author of Spooks, winner of the Saturnalia Books Editors Prize, and American Zero, selected by Danez Smith for the Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize. A graduate of Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Wong has published poems in Colorado Review, Lana Turner, The L.A. Review of Books, and Poetry.