*Please note: We sent this poem out on 11/6 with an incorrect title. This is the correct version. We sincerely regret our error!
Welcome to SWWIM Every Day’s preview coverage of Miami Book Fair (MBF) 2022! The poets whose work you’ll be reading every weekday from October 15 through November 15 are just a few of the many authors from around the world participating in this year’s MBF, the nation’s largest gathering of writers and readers of all ages. They all look forward to sharing their work, thoughts, and ideas both in person and online. Between November 13-20, new poet conversations and readings will be launched and available for free on miamibookfaironline.com (in addition to other content). For more information, visit the website and follow MBF on Instagram and Twitter at @miamibookfair and use the hashtag #miamibookfair2022.
for a friend, whose name, whose face I no longer remember when I was a child my family lived in a building six stories tall and a field of wild grasses grew in front and in the field was a well with a heavy iron lid that one day opened, left agape so in the field there came to be a mouth with a long throat full of rain, the husks of crickets and yellow dust, tiny bodies the rain overpowered & when the wind blew the mouth hollowed with sound in the field you and I played with our fingers pointed into guns, our elbows and knees patched in the loose camouflage of dirt we climbed my father’s red motorcycle ticking as it cooled by the tall grass here we rushed and tumbled straining against the other as if to break through to another life and the mouth in the field opened waiting for you to find it
Anni Liu is the author of Border Vista (Persea Books), which won the 2021 Lexi Rudnitsky Prize. She received her MFA from Indiana University and has been supported by the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Anderson Center at Tower View, a Djanikian Scholarship from The Adroit Journal, and an Undocupoets Fellowship. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Ecotone, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. Born in Xi’an, China, she now lives in northern Louisiana and is an editor at Graywolf Press.
Reprinted from Border Vista. Copyright © 2022 by Anni Liu. Used with the permission of Persea Books.
**We do our best to preserve the integrity of each poem; however, due to programming limitations, some poems may read differently on a mobile phone and in certain browsers. For best viewing, use Chrome on a desktop/laptop.