I'm ready to talk about rage
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but do not ask me
about my father. Instead, here is a shovel & plot of dirt to dig & fill. Here is my grandfather’s belt, bent leather & eagle-head buckle. Here is the dog shot for tearing a piece out of my cousin’s arm. Here is a gun. Choke chain. Chain-link fence. Here is a flagpole whittled to a point at both ends. Here is a careless country & its careful bombs. Here is a mirror. Mortar. Fireworks & singed grass. Here is a man & a man with their shovels, each digging a hole, hoping to bury the other. |
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Brandon Melendez is a Mexican-American poet from California. He is the author of Gold That Frames The Mirror (Write Bloody, 2019). He is a National Poetry Slam finalist and two-time Berkeley Grand Slam Champion. A recipient of the 2018 Djanikian Scholarship from The Adroit Journal, and the 2018 Academy of American Poets Award, his poems are in or forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Muzzle Magazine, Ninth Letter, The Journal, PANK, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. He currently lives in Boston and is an MFA candidate at Emerson College.
Xiaofu Wang, born in Wuhan, China, works and lives in Brooklyn, New York. She received her BFA from China Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing (2013) and earned her MFA at Maryland Institute College of Art in the LeRoy E Hoffberger School of Painting (2017). Xiaofu is currently a 2018-19 fellow for the fully-funded fellowship Shandaken Paint School in New York City. She has shown her work in New York, Baltimore, Colorado, and Beijing. In 2018, Xiaofu’s work was featured in ArtMaze Magazine and Magazine Parcours. She was awarded residencies at Elsewhere Studio Residency and Art Farm Nebraska.