Micro Portrait

En masse we assembled here for the naming
of tragic rooms. It was too quiet, called back toward
you in monochrome, the weather, salt dragging
across the hardwood. I alone approach
the image, it does not disappoint. It bleeds across
my tapes, blue was its sole intention revising
your earlier shape. If one looks hard and finding
you good for nothing. Am I so wilted I
trail a heavy foot across the line, there is evidence you
stay alive. If I look back and cleanly pause, next do
not look again.

Originally published in Bat City Review Issue 11

Wendy Xu is a poet, editor, and professor, most recently the author of Phrasis (Fence, 2017), named one of the 10 Best Poetry Books of 2017 by the New York Times Book Review. Her debut collection You Are Not Dead (2013), was named by Poets & Writers Magazine as one of the year’s Top 10 debuts.

Xu was awarded the Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry in 2011, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation in 2014, and her work has appeared (or is forthcoming) in The Best American Poetry, Granta, The New Republic, Boston Review, Poetry, Tin House, BOMB, Triple Canopy, A Public Space, and widely elsewhere.

Born in Shandong, China, she holds an MFA from the Program for Poets & Writers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She has been on creative writing faculty at the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Columbia University, New York University, and is currently assistant professor of writing in poetry at The New School. She lives in Brooklyn, and serves as Poetry Editor for the arts magazine Hyperallergic.