excerpt from “Tell Me What You See”
In name, I am closer to mother.
Only the twins of light understand
when I prophesy the end,
the world cloaked in fallout.
I hear the horrible warble—humans
trumpeting their war psalms—
and I rise, a warrior summoned.
Mother guarding creation.
Only those close to death
can defeat the undefeatable.
Nancy Chen Long is the author of Wider Than the Sky (Diode Editions, 2020) and Light into Bodies (University of Tampa Press, 2017). She is the grateful recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing fellowship. Her work was selected as the winner of the 2019 Poetry Society of America Robert H. Winner Award and featured in Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and Indiana Humanities. You’ll find her recent work in Copper Nickel, Poet Lore, The Cincinnati Review, The Southern Review, Smartish Pace, The Adroit Journal, Tar River Poetry, and elsewhere. She works at Indiana University in the Research Technologies division. website: https://www.nancychenlong.com/