uNtogether

by Steven Duong

and sleep-thin, we ride into the crawlspace
of January, meet I-80’s long blank stare with
our eyes red and our needs seated between
us like strangers—countless, quiet,

unmet. We know history
is written by the warmly dressed,
that the poets will freeze in their
Camrys, and so we hustle.

It is dark now.

We have agreed to stop belonging to
each other in the dark. We must be and
long for new things, things pleasing to the ear,
things bought and sold at market price. 

For a long time, our mothers were toothpicks
dangling from the mouths of Watertown and
Chinatown. Sharp things 
chewed down. Which is what we are

becoming—eventually, we are all our ancestors
remixed, played raw against the city’s din.
Flash your luck, says
the dark to our brainstems. Let your teeth

               be celebrations, little Tếts, loud, bright,
impossibly gold. A lawless brand of
yellow. You’ll miss your paychecks, your flights,
your families. So what? You are still

in motion. At dawn, the world is yours, even
if you want nothing to do with it.

Steven Duong is an American poet and a child of Vietnamese immigrants. The recipient of two Academy of American Poets University Prizes, he is currently traveling internationally for a year as a Thomas J. Watson Fellow, conducting a writing project titled “Freshwater Fish and the Poetry of a Containment.” His work is featured or forthcoming in Pleiades, Poets.org, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Salt Hill, The Shallow Ends, Hobart, Split Lip Magazine, and other venues. Catch him on stevenduongwrites.com.