How many sentences do you need to sink a kayak
Welcome to my list of necessarily unanswerable questions
Dear person I am writing this for your morning urgency of light
For whatever questions about the future come into your bed
This is just to say that in fifty years we will not be fossils
Do you believe me when I transmit a certain fearlessness
When I give advice I can feel myself choking on a mouthful of apples
I am bad with money and clumsy with language
I believe that birds are not sandwiches waiting to happen
Hello from the clearest blue sky in America
It is so perfect to watch the river slowly braiding its milky hair
To feel confidently inclined toward kindness
We are living inside a thing someone said to someone we will never meet
Please ask me how I am honest
What I mean is: between sleeping and waking I find myself intact
I do not want to compare the sheets to anything except themselves
Dear person I like your attention to clocks
Mine roll their eyes and I move forward in time
I would like for any other human to understand why that is gorgeous
DO YOU HAVE A SHAPE is what I have been yelling at stars
Wendy Xu is the author of You Are Not Dead, selected by Michael Dumanis from the 2012 Cleveland State University Poetry Center first book contest, to be published in 2013. She is also the author of two chapbooks: The Hero Poems (H_NGM_N 2011) and I Was Not Even Born (Coconut Books 2013), a collaboration with Nick Sturm. Recent poems have appeared inColumbia Poetry Review; DIAGRAM; Cutbank; Forklift, Ohio; Third Coast; MAKE; and elsewhere. She lives in Northampton, MA, and is the co-editor/publisher of iO: A Journal of New American Poetry/iO Books, and co-curator of the patterns of excitement/Jones reading series.
