Jenny Xie is the author of the poetry collection Nowhere to Arrive (Northwestern University Press). Her latest collection, Eye Level (Graywolf Press), won the 2017 Walt Whitman Award, and is currently a finalist for the 2018 Pen Open Book Award. Her poem below, titled “Invisible Relations,” appears in ZYZZYVA No. 111.
There are no simple stories, because language forces distances. The days gummy and without drink. And a question stammers in the mind for weeks, one key aquiver on the piano. In the course of a day, your head will point in all the cardinal directions. It is good to wake and sleep, to scrape jars with spoons. Nights, grape popsicles sew sugar into your mouth. Police sirens clean the air and the TV burns out. Without your knowing, the unseen borders of your hunger are redrawn.
Far off, you are being stitched into a storyline in the smooth lobe of another’s mind.