Anna Maria Hong


The Real Decoy



Democracy and freedom deadlocked and unstocked
guns of rebels—
I am neither maid nor mortar.
I am (n)either blank (n)or shell. 

I am incapable of looking well—
and whom
is the tale to tell. And who will
fare thee well when all is done

for one or none.
The inquiry is kept
like silence & I can never open
in gold & blood & gold & blood & gold 

& blood. Then let me be the bearer—
Is it the hard apple core?


Anna Maria Hong

Anna Maria Hong is the author of Age of Glass, winner of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Poetry Competition and the Poetry Society of America’s 2019 Norma Farber First Book Award, and the novella H & G (Sidebrow Books), winner of the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s Clarissa Dalloway Prize. Her second poetry collection, Fablesque, won Tupelo Press’s Berkshire Prize and is forthcoming in September 2020. A former Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, she has published poetry and fiction in many journals and anthologies including The Nation, The Iowa Review, Ecotone, Shenandoah, Green Mountains Review, ENTROPY, Pleiades, Verse Daily, Poetry Daily, and The Best American Poetry.

ISSN 2472-338X
© 2020