Today's poem is by Shawn Hoo

Referential
       

Of the myths this city boy believes in: nature
poems don't exist. The city as the source of metaphor.
That the songless warbler in my throat is more residue

than resident. That the word refused to land. When taught
to say bird, I refused. Then, refusing bilingual niao, was hurled
the word jiao. Refusing again, the tongue's bifurcation,

my parents shoved in my face—the pearl black eye
trapped in the angular black body of a bow, its one-stroke
upward plume, and below, a horizontal line dashed

—an ideogram. The thing in my throat still migratory
without ground. Mid-flight, she crumpled. I could see her
hesitating to land in a world financed by glass, crinkle

as if to approximate that crass image of herself.
My family couldn't just show me the real thing; they hooked
shiny CDs at windows to blunder them blind. I blinked

when the optometrist shone a torch down my eye
to find nothing; almost cried. They advocated speech
therapists who tried to coax the warbler to her nest.

Some kind of speech arrest, then she becomes fugitive,
wanted on my books. On the way home,
I heard a lady point burung and turned. Empty tree.

In class, I thought I heard my teacher say bard
and copied her. When she corrected me to say bird,
I say ballistic. I say c'est bon, à bientôt, j'ai une belle

Vie. She says precocious young boy who hasn't
seen a parakeet. I say no one in this class has seen a
portmanteau. The warbler in my throat skips

a beat. No one could show me a real world
the real word aphasia referred to, so I intone real names
for the wings in my throat. I warble at the windows.

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Copyright © 2023 Shawn Hoo All rights reserved
from Of the Florids
Diode Editions
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission