ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Kyle Oh is an economics major and creative writing minor at the University of Houston, and also a poetry reader for their undergraduate journal Glass Mountain. This is his fourth poetry acceptance, with his previous poems appearing in the literary journals Sink Hollow, The New Southern Fugitives, and the forthcoming issue of Screen Door Review: Literary Voices of the Queer South. He is Nigerian-American, lives in Houston, and likes to write very gay stories or play video games while he procrastinates.
Also by Kyle Oh:
After Staring Too Awkwardly at Men Holding Hands
Seven Essays in Response to Being Told “Coming Out Stories of Gay Teenagers With Unaccepting Parents is an Overdone Trope, Nobody’s Really That Homophobic Anymore”
qfter Chen Chen
(1.)
i
(2.)
am unfurling
(3.)
So, there will be no birds
doing bird things in this poem
as I suppose we are all sick
of them and there will be no sex,
nothing about men doing men things
or gay things or those who are thingly
or white things and also no unwhite things either
as I suppose we are all tired of not-whiteness and whiteness and yet
(4.)
(5.) I am unbirding. I am trying to unbird the birds. If i am a dove
So pretty
and white,
it must be nearly dead
as the white space
full of nothing. It must be twitching in some puddle. It must be
as unwhitened as this essay. It must be
— sorry, let me unbird —
It must be just a thing
and who hasn't seen a dying thing before?
(6. )
Still I would ask that floundering thing,
What will you do now that your existence is an overdone trope,
now that your angst is so thingly and unremarkable,
now that your identity is a literary commodity
that hit the market a little too late?
( .)
I suppose that in its thrashing it would not care for such a question.
Many thanks to Chen Chen for the inspiration. This poem is written in a similar style of his poem, Four Short Essays Personifying a Future in Which White Supremacy Has Ended. The subject matter of this poem of course came to me upon hearing the critique quoted in the title, and my own personal struggles with trying to un-gay my poems and stories. I started writing at about the same time I started coming out to myself, so naturally, almost everything I’ve written has some “gay struggle” in it. I’ve been pressured by others and myself to write about something else besides another gay poem, or at least write about queer happiness as opposed to the ol’ sad story of unaccepting parents. This poem is about wrestling with that pressure. Suffice it to say, I’m still writing extremely gay poems, and it’s a personal goal of mine to get the raunchiest gay sex poem ever published. Stay tuned.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
