“As She Appears”

Shelley Wong is a Kundiman Fellow and the author of the chapbook Rare Birds (Diode Editions, 2017). Her poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, Massachusetts Review, and Sycamore Review, among others. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from MacDowell Colony, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, I-Park Foundation, and Palm Beach Poetry Festival. Her poem “As She Appears”

& who asks after a woman alone in the forest

& to bring the origins of language & set them on the table, cleared of dishes

& to become heavy with the accumulation of texts

& who listens when she speaks

& what is her color story

& how many shades of red does a woman bleed each month

the uses of passion & her arrival as a blade

& what is the indigenous history of the land & its names

she sits in the field at dusk as fireflies flare & rise

& will the witches let her in

& by what means of initiation

& how to correct & how to reinvent

a woman in the wild & a wild woman

she sets her hands in the river & walks into the open water

& how much anger can a woman keep

& if her song is off-key

the trees become caryatids, the women lift their leaves

as she brings fire & smoke, after years of care

Credit : Kenyan Review