By Emily Lee Luan

Featured art: Into Something Rich and Strange by Caleb Sunderhaus

   In the morning I wake up
feeling unmoved   hardly
   particular   the house

around me quieted by early
   rain   I feel hungry and so
I eat   I wash  my face

   measure the relative length
of my hair    to my shoulder
   Sometimes I let myself  feel

exceptional   stretch my arms
   in open   grasses   
the suspension lasting only

   until dinnertime   or upon
learning he once loved a girl
   with collarbones   just like

mine   But today isn’t remarkable  
   I’ve stopped looking at my
body   naked in the mirror or

   washing in between my toes
It feels as if nobody   has seen
   me in days   Something in that

makes me want  to be   object
   caught in a window frame
or otherwise  violently   found

   I scatter brightly colored
candies into my palm   frame
   my hand  against the white

of the porcelain sink   It makes
   so much sense  that someone
would love me  until it    doesn’t

---

Emily Lee Luan is a Taiwanese American poet and essayist. A 2020 Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets (2019), The Rumpus, The Offing, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Rutgers University-Newark.