Cat Wei is a poet and writer in New York. She is a Bread Loaf Katharine Bakeless Nason Contributor Award recipient, a Tin House Workshop alumn, and an Idyllwild Writers Week Fellow. Her work is Best of the Net nominated and appears in The Slowdown, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, Vagabond City, Sundog Lit, and Lantern Review. A finalist for the Disquiet Literary Contest and Pleiades’ Prufer Poetry Prize, she has received support from The Edith Wharton & Straw Dog Writers Guild Writers-in-Residence Program, the Vermont Studio Center, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Sundress Academy for the Arts, and Winter Tangerine. The winner of a Princeton University German Department Book Award, she holds a BA in Comparative Literature and a BS in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania.
To sliced bread
and every dog
day in America,
to peanut butter
and hands jammed smooth
in the making of an American
dollar, to every highway,
truck, and minivan,
to the drizzled tar
gleaming midnight
over jagged edges
of asphalt, to the land
of equal shot
and opportunity
to buy or sell a lottery,
a life, I want
to whisper your praise
inside the chicken
nugget factories
where no birds sing.
I want to feel alive
on a Saturday night,
while congaing in a Walmart line,
fist pumping the air
until it’s bruised. I’m buying
bulk everything, pizza,
burgers, and fries, an onion
ring, a lie, I’m living it
behind the closed doors
of an American handshake.
Oh that slip-n-slide of life,
ice in everything I swallow,
my laugher splits frozen
and shaved on the third floor
of an office night
where everyone flees
and only the plants are left
I want to breathe,
find love, grow inches there,
I want to see a baseball game
where home is not a hit
and run, but a reckoning
for every ceaseless
worker who works
from death to death
through the silver ashes
of an American morning.
Gratitude, I want to say,
for the bodies that make up
the hills I’ve climbed on
high enough to see the top
is an endless piercing blaze
obscuring the eye’s vision
of the grand pyramid
scheme of America.
I want to give praise
to the low percentage rate
of that thirty year mortgage
contract a body can yoke to
and call owning, I want
to admire the bird of prey
still playing hero in the trees,
careening and forgetting
how many of us
will have to die
before you listen? I guess
it must be easy in the suburbs,
in the towns where neighbors
never learn each other’s names,
but I’ve never been able
to forget you America,
the ribbons you’ve made
of my loved ones’ dreams, the sky
is truly vast and endless here, oh
as soft as the soft serves
and hard cheese,
but I can’t seem to sing it
America, it’s too bright,
and I’m too scared
of the dark blood
on your warm white hands.
I started this poem in a class with Shira Erlichmann in a discussion about anti-odes as a way of exploring the grief inside of something that is supposedly joyful. In this case, I was reckoning with the very real dreams and expectations that had come with moving to this country, placed against the stark realities that Covid had further exposed about the safety of People of the Global Majority here. When I first wrote this piece in 2021, I was thinking back to how dazzled my family was by the “American dream” and feeling deeply out of touch with what we’d been sold. That’s not to say I don’t love the life that I have. But one element that is very charming and endlessly frustrating about American culture is the enormous pressure to stay positive and upbeat in our conversations with each other. I wrote this poem out of frustration, and against my own mostly good habit to always make the best out of tough things. Later, I was grateful to polish this piece in a Cave Canem class with Cynthia Manick. I wanted to complicate the classic images of America because this nation’s violence, which is directed so flagrantly toward the rest of the world, is also directed at its own people. I wanted to pay tribute to what people endure here and speak to the stakes of surviving, striving, and dreaming in this country, which is that it could cost us our lives.