Why I Reach for You When I Know I Can’t Touch You
by Paul Tran
The surprise
of flowers
overnight
in the backyard.
A bag of soil
left outside
to dry in the sun.
A pot stacked
inside another pot
stacked inside
another.
Someone was
here, I thought.
Someone had to
have done this
while I was busy
doing whatever
I was doing
in order not to
pay attention
to the world
that, unlike me,
has no choice
but to keep on
going. Changing.
Being and being
changed. I go
about my day.
Another email.
Another dish
in the sink.
Another hour
stacked inside
another hour.
Was I to want
to be that
heft of sun-
lit earth, that wave
of sun-crowned stems
opening and closing
their petals, their faces
turning to darkness
only in death?
Maybe I do.
Maybe I don’t.
Paul Tran is the recipient of the Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from The Poetry Foundation and the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize. Their work appears in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, Good Morning America, and elsewhere, including the Lionsgate movie Love Beats Rhymes with Azealia Banks, Common, and Jill Scott. They are the first Asian American since 1993 to win the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam, placing top 10 at the Individual World Poetry Slam and top 2 at the National Poetry Slam. Paul is the Senior Poetry Fellow in The Writing Program at Washington University in St. Louis and Poetry Editor of The Offing Magazine, which won a Whiting Literary Magazine Award from the Whiting Foundation.
