Dirt-eating Poem — Blackbird Archive

← v13n1, Spring 2014

Dear stranger, deracinate me. Pull

my head out like a turnip and spare

me the instructions for piloting

ruinous spaces. Amphibious town

made of mica, in which the cascades

tumble predictably, in which seasons

resurrect the same stinkbugs, tulips,

bellyaches—the illness of mistaken

wishes has branded me an outsider.

Pardon me: I’ll find the way to make

hope scarce and live with the correct

privation. The kind that isn’t borrowed,

too cruel or kind. Clothed in tongueless

solicitude. Fit for eunuchs or ghosts.

identity displacement immigration

Sally Wen Mao

Sally Wen Mao is the author of a forthcoming book of poems, Mad Honey Symposium (Alice James Books, 2014), which received the 2012 Kinereth Gensler Award and was a finalist for the 2012 Tupelo Press First / Second Book Prize. Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2013 and is published or forthcoming in Colorado Review , Gulf Coast , Indiana Review , Passages North , Quarterly West , Third Coast , and West Branch , among others. She is a Kundiman fellow and earned an MFA from Cornell University, where she is a lecturer. Photo by Mariamma Kambon