From the Archive: Kim Fu (CAROUSEL 34)

Staff/ November 24, 2020/ Poem

KIM FU

Lifecycle of the Mole-Woman: Infancy as a Human

I’ve seen this waist-high grass
and weeping tree before, in a drugstore frame
and a Bollywood movie, the trunk a pivot point
for coquettish hide and seek. On the cover
of Vanity Fair it had a swing,
just two ropes and a plank, a girl levitating
on the tip of her coccyx. Poofy virginal
white dress, elegant lipstick slash, Cubist chin,
she had it all. Someone proposed here,
votive candles in a heart, a flowered trellis;
it went viral on the internet and spawned
a thousand thousand proposals. Someone
has decided this is a place where no one
can be ugly, this lonely hillside that bears
but one tree, one strand of sweet grass,
summer sun fixed at one low angle,
stuck like broken spotlight. The branches
ache to be free of their heavy greenery,
to winter for once. Shorn, fallen, and bare.

Kim Fu is a Canadian-born writer living in Seattle, Washington. Her most recent novel, The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore (Harper Collins, 2018) was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the OLA Evergreen Award. Her previous novel For Today I Am a Boy (Harper Collins, 2014) won the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and was long-listed for CBC’s Canada Reads. Fu’s debut poetry collection was How Festive the Ambulance (Nightwood Editions, 2016). Fu’s writing has appeared in Granta, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Hazlitt, enRoute and The Times Literary Supplement. More: kim-fu.com

Lifecycle of the Mole-Woman: Infancy as a Human
appeared in CAROUSEL 34 (2015) — buy it here

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