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.




November 5, 2024

Cat Wei

Ode to America






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.


Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published weekly by Glass Poetry Press.
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