ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Kathy Jiang (she/her) is a poet and therapist from the D.C. area. Her work, which has been nominated for Best New Poets and received support from Brooklyn Poets, Sundress Academy for the Arts, and other organizations, is featured or forthcoming in Ninth Letter, Hayden's Ferry Review, Sundog Lit, Oxford Poetry, and elsewhere. She is an editor and facilitator at Seventh Wave and a poetry reader at Adroit.
August 19, 2026
Love spell to remain
after Lynda Hull, Mitski
Thinking of boys on a balcony in the old part of Seoul.
Thinking of their thudless boiling points, tipping over.
Thinking of circling back. To losing. To being a loser.
Sitting there on that twin wicker chair, in the open air of love.
Thinking of audiences, shimmering blue in their shellacked faces.
Those sinuous, beating earrings, hanging, falling fast with their wavy legs.
Afterwards, God, sifting through the last ceiling rafter, left above. Spinning. Thinking.
Thinking, of you. Insinuating lateness. This thunderless heat.
Too little, too late. Surprising me anyways.
I wrote the first draft of this in a workshop with Terrance Hayes, who encouraged us to borrow words and phrases from the work we admire as a starting point for ourselves, to take and use what most sung out to us. I took that to heart in this poem, which unites one of his great artistic loves, Lynda Hull, with one of mine, Mitski. It’s written after Hull’s “Lost Fugue for Chet” and Mitski’s “Townie.”
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published weekly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
