Excerpt from Travel Poems
…..(Premature departure or the failure to arrive)
…..
She fills a form at the lost and found
…..
to enter the international database
of mishandled bags.
…..
She browses the vacation shop
for forms to cover her hairless body.
Forms
fly out the drawers.
She laughs
then cries at
“100% polyester”
wonders
where her body will burn
after she dies.
…..
A. has a form that is no longer recognized
by the international committee of forms.
…..
At the airport she will never visit
they are asking her bodies
to hand over their forms.
…..
She is holding on to the last of their forms.
…..
Over the next few days she will call
the international database
of mishandled bags.
……
She will sign her name into tiny forms.
She will not give up her body.
……
This poem is from the chapbook The Problem of Deer by Lydia T. Liu (Finishing Line Press), and can be found at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/the-problem-of-deer-by-lydia-t-liu/
The Problem of Deer is a lyrical exploration of the transitory landscapes that shape a diasporic experience. It traces the shifting cartographies of the heart, moving from the dissonances of history and geographical origins to the multiplicities of desire and language. These poems find beauty in their gentle yet persistent interrogations—through the voice of a young peripatetic.
Lydia T. Liu is an award-winning poet and multidisciplinary researcher, whose work evokes diasporic consciousness through a fusion of lyric and experimental poetics. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Cimarron Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, Poetry Society of America, and elsewhere. A graduate of Princeton University and University of California Berkeley, she teaches at Princeton and lives in New York City. The Problem of Deer is her first chapbook.
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