Shelley Wong
Inventory
At the last preserved Nike missile site in America, a deer walks between the barbed wire fences
A bell in the distance——a bird, a bell, a boat
Fog floats through the eucalyptus, its bark shedding like pages
Some days I’m that deer or the one bringing it water
I was categorizing a feeling of love while the ocean kept coming
closer——
The coast is the first line of defense
Mother says to spend less time with paper
Overlooking the Bay, there is coyote grass, ice plant, Monterey
cypress——sagebrush is different from sage
When you go to the ocean you tell the truth
When the Spanish explorers came to the Americas, they saw the passionflower as proof that they had reached a blessed land: the flower’s five petals and five sepals represented ten apostles, the circle of hairlike rays as the crown of thorns
I say to the flower you don’t have to be Christian
If someone is ill, what I whisper is almost prayer
During Fleet Week, the Blue Angels scrape the sky
In the water, sea foam gathers in the shape of a whale
The word Alcatraz comes from the archaic Spanish word for pelican, which was borrowed from the Arabic al-ghattas meaning sea eagle
The ocean was the forgetting, a way out of the papers
In place of god I hold other forms of devotion, other silences
A bell in the distance calling names
Fireworks and paper——our best inventions——
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I see this seasonal work in conversation with Nicolette Polek’s “Waiting at the American Clock Museum,” of being in and out of time, layered in time, surrounded by time's echo.
Shelley Wong is the author of As She Appears, longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry and winner of the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry. “Inventory” is a part of her second book manuscript centered on California as a place and environment intersected with her Chinese American ancestors’ immigration in the late 1800s and early 1900s.