excerpt from “Tell Me What You See”
My sister and I disappeared
once we arrived Stateside.
People could no longer tell us
apart. You look the same. No, no
one is closer to me. Our wings
clap together. My darling playmate.
A song forced in unison perforce
creates a void. When the obedient one
obliges, someone’s voice gets clipped
and a need to cleave arises.
To leave a forest of aspen
in want of a Joshua tree.
Over time, mirror
opposites, my sister and I.
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/