Poem of the Week: Jennifer Chang

Dorothy Wordsworth

The daffodils can go fuck themselves.

I’m tired of their crowds, yellow rantings

about the spastic sun that shines and shines

and shines. How are they any different

from me?  I, too, have a big messy head

on a fragile stalk.  I spin with the wind.

I flower and don’t apologize. There’s nothing

funny about good weather. Oh, spring again,

the critics nod. They know the old joy,

that wakeful quotidian, the dark plot

of future growing things, each one

labeled Narcissus nobilis or Jennifer Chang.

If I died falling from a helicopter, then

this would be an important poem. Then

the ex-boyfriends would swim to shore

declaiming their knowledge of my bulbous

youth. O, Flower, one said, why aren’t you

meat? But I won’t be another bashful shank.

The tulips have their nervous joie-de-vivre,

the lilacs their taunt. Fractious petals, stop

interrupting me with your boring beauty.

All the boys are in the field gnawing raw

bones of ambition and calling it ardor. Who

the hell are they? This is a poem about war.

Previously published in The Nation and then Best American Poetry 2012.

Used by permission.

Photo by Evan Rhodes. 

Jennifer Chang is the author of The History of Anonymity. Poems from a new manuscript have appeared in Best American Poetry 2012, Kenyon Review, The Nation, Poetry, A Public Space, The Rumpus, and have been featured on NPR's Morning Edition and the arts and culture blogs of the Chronicle of Higher Education and PBS NewsHour. She also writes about poetry for the Los Angeles Review of Books and is completing a critical study on race, pastoral, and American modernist poetics. She co-chairs the advisory board of Kundiman and is an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at George Washington University. She lives in DC with her husband and son.  

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