EMERGING ARTISTS & WRITERS: ANNIE FAN
ANNIE FAN
CANTINA
After Ross Gay
So many tigers become used to humans
and their unfathomable fingers, every digit
independent to the last
but choosing to move in tandem,
first thumb then pointer, as if each action
has a mind thinking of meat and
its coolness, this evening as you walk to the bar:
enclosed on all sides covered
with images of a tiger’s predecessors rivaling
and stupid for touch or at least its fierceness,
burst further beyond the foggy glass and drunks
that force you to courage
while they wait with empty hands for you to fill
their fear unmade into powerful running muscle,
by jungle-breaths and the religion of prey,
that finds the urban road
where you watch yourself prowl.
DREAM IN WHICH MY MOTHER'S MOUTH BECOMES THE HUANGHE
my mother weaves a cradle with
half-tongue. yawning mouth
of marshweeds, chloroform,
and swears babies can overspill like water
from our cracked jaws, but choose
to bleed – freeflowing,
and crushed by shoulders, so
candid. every wide-eyed
hush of pedalo skin
dripping with ocean – listen, a wade
of cleftsounds ring like
lost wire forks humming with
the thaw. every last winter run like fish oil,
mandarin peel burnt into knees where
there was once a goddess
with red hair and inkstone teeth –
swallowed newborns cupped in her net
of rind; not broken, but breaking
from the seas. i can hear nothing but
gaps, which we dashed like soapstatues of
naked children glassy-eyed with
blood, and she chokes out the things
liquescent words can’t touch, riverlips
opened thirsty for a girl to hide
A Foyle Young Poet, Annie Fan's most recent work is either stuck to the fridge or published in Transect, sleepingfish ∞, Ambit, and the Blueshift Journal where it was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is a prose editor at TRACK//FOUR.