“I’ve gone to look for America, (Rifle, 2021)” by Haena Yoo, courtesy Murmurs Gallery

 

I had a barrage of roses tangled in my brain. 

I was taken with this fragrance, bedeviled 

with the bee’s pollen and night grace.

 

I desired and wanted all at once, pooled 

in a reservoir where my childhood drank, 

from a well stationed in the backyard 

 

of my memory. The struggling grass 

and the swinging tire, glass bottles 

set beside the fence as flowers. My mind 

 

returned here where refuge was the promise 

of growth instead of the bloom itself. 

I was a child of rust, browning at the interior, 

 

with a scent of floral determination. 

You’ll sometimes find me here, too, 

as a lion, the day’s nettle in my mane. 

 

If there was a roar, it shuddered the puddles 

which shook in delight. If there was stalking

it might have been by the train tracks, which never

 

functioned except sometimes there was a

faint bell at night, sometimes signaling

someone about to trip lightly on the runner.





Tina Chang

TINA CHANG is the author of the poetry collections LION (2026, W.W. Norton) and Hybrida (2019, W.W. Norton) which NPR named, "one of the most important books of poetry to come along in years,” as well as Of Gods & Strangers (2011) and Half-Lit Houses (2004). Co-editor of the Norton anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond, she is the recipient of the 2026 Poets & Writers Writers for Writers Award, an Academy of American Poets Laureate fellowship, as well as awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, among many others. In 2010, she was named the first female Poet Laureate of Brooklyn and she served in this role for over a decade. She is Professor of English at Binghamton University.