LOUDSPEAKER:: Poetry by Wo Chan

Writing

Jul 16

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WUSSY is proud to present poetry by New York writer, Wo Chan.
If you would like to send in a writing submission, please contact Nicholas Goodly.

performing miss america at bushwig 2018, then chilling

breathe some reddish dolphins (these bare feet busted),
tore through my capezios, unmoisturized, they join
your pilgrim black boot—oh my mammal...
the wide, weekend’s long disclosure of drugs drawn

precious, depressed, high function-high anxious: 2018
gifts us fed dociérs on our stupendous thumbs-down needs.
you need therapy. i need money. we ditch our brains
unable to shred the fog of futures where civics, passion,

paycheck, and pleasure meet. Two hours ago, we ran late through slashing
rain on Smith, tumbling you, your sister, (family) in the Uber XL backseat,
helped me paste a glittering red AMERICA on my toilet paper sash.

we made it. early at bushwig, barely attended, i exploded the bouquet,
rolled nakedly on stage. i didn’t expect to make 14 dollars cash,
crumpled. i took mushrooms as planned. time unclenched. i found you! sipping rosé

backbar, i was so happy. joy was flapping its wings in the dustbath!
you said i didn’t seem different but by then i could no longer bear violence,
however simulated. i wanted only to see soft things: your empath
friend, Our Lady of Paradise, gives guided meditations, undoing some violence
in synchrony, she sings under the megawatts of her holographic leotard:
new songs about her gender dysphoria.
my smile pancakes beyond the edges of my cuisinart
face “she’s so greeeaaaat” i say stretching like an accordion.

but, how useful are words now? by then i had lost the white pearls
glued on my décolleté—they dropped far like seeds from a seagulls asshole.
thinking about a feeling is like photocopying a feeling. that scanning light is safe.
i brag my brain is fearless, yet my terrific heart runs across my face.
waiting for the all-gender bathrooms with you, i just wanted to sit and melt
like kerrygold into your fur coat. you said it was real. i knew that. i felt it.

—

Wo Chan is a poet and drag performer. They are the winner of the 2020 Indiana Review Poetry Prize, and have been awarded fellowships from New York Foundation for the Arts, Kundiman, and the Asian American Writers Workshop. Wo’s poems appear in POETRY, Mass Review, No Tokens, and The Margins. As a standing member of the Brooklyn based drag/burlesque collective Switch N' Play, Wo has performed at The Whitney Museum of American Art, National Sawdust, New York Live Arts, and BAM Fisher. Wo was born in Macau, China, and currently lives in Brooklyn. Find them at @theillustriouspearl

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