Jane Wong


Dream Daughter as Idiom, Watering

I wake to deer shitting / blackberry pellets, steaming
mound all croquembouche / gai lan crisply chewed, roots
matted and mangled in dripping / dirt, my dream daughter’s
wrung-out hair watering / the pity crops. Woke to
the garden slewing side to / side, sludge of sputtered
squash and plum fallen / cheeks pelting the crimson
ground. Everything is / a mess, I welp, split-
pea plummeting. My chin / anchoring into myself, into
what came before. Bridges collapsing / at once, brutal
bellow, bricked. Do not open / that door. Do not walk
at night alone. Do not mouth / your open wide. That
look, down up. They say / a growing daughter is
smuggled salt, say that’s my / girl, my comfort, my thing
that whistles want / want. Better lock up
your daughter’s mother’s / daughter. Locked
in what world I / feeble sprout my fear. Pig snout
stink of surrender, I can’t / help it. My dream
daughter reroots me / watering her hair, watering
the puckered pumpkins, rind / of some furious fecund
elsewhere. Watch / her weave a spider into each hollow

Jane Wong

Jane Wong's poems can be found in places such as Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019, American Poetry Review, Agni, Poetry, Third Coast, and others. Her essays have appeared in McSweeney's, Black Warrior Review, Ecotone, The Georgia Review, The Common, Shenandoah, and This is the Place: Women Writing About Home. A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships and residencies from the U.S. Fulbright Program, Artist Trust, the Fine Arts Work Center, Willapa Bay AiR, Hedgebrook, the Jentel Foundation, and the Mineral School. She is the author of Overpour from Action Books, and How to Not Be Afraid of Everything, which is forthcoming from Alice James in 2021. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Western Washington University.

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