January 2021

#finalpoems / [?]

Wild Flower

I’m a wild weed
Roaming from field to field
Trampled, plucked, and shred
Reappearing in places unexpected

You hope to change
The flower that won’t be tamed
Planted in your fancy vase, I shrivel
My days more and more dismal

I wait for time to pass
Praying this prison will collapse
Winds blow me back outside
Soaring, my soul flies

I will survive the season
Knowing I live by my own decisions
Always going to be me
Dancing wild and free

Yong Takahashi was a finalist in The Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Southern Fried Karma Novel Contest, Gemini Magazine Short Story Contest, and Georgia Writers Association Flash Fiction Contest. She was awarded Best Pitch at the Atlanta Writers Club Conference.
The Escape to Candyland, a short story collection, was published in 2020.
To learn more about Yong, visit: yctwriter.com
All social media @yctwriter

#finalpoems / [?]

Subtlety amid the emergency.

1. How the body surfaces from exhaustion: light, agile, sensitive as the season.
2. Stay close enough to your suffering to receive its wisdom.
3. Open the windows.
4. Take rest.
5. Wait generously.
6. Observe the gradual, intuitive discernment that occurs in relief of obligation.
7. In case of psychic dispersal, reach through the winds of confusion with a steady hand, and draw a line down the centre.
8. Anticipate the threshold before you meet it.
9. Find pause between sensation and articulation: thrum and sigh, supple as an iris, steady as a sunflower.
10. Investigate the data. Feel the wave beneath the wave. The whirl and swell.
11. Decide to stay.
12. Dream deep into the night and seed perception of multiplicities flourishing.
13. Enable the conditions to give a little more space to what hurts, and keep it company.
14. Move into the sting when it endures.
15. Sit still and let your perception dilate.
16. The compass spins to the sublime in all directions.
17. Find the erotic measure between the safety and chaos.
18. Edge to touch the light of your ambitions.

Alisha Mascarenhas is a poet and translator living in Brooklyn. Recent collaborative work was commissioned by Asiya Wadud and supported by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council for the project ECHO EXHIBIT, presented as part of River to River 2020: Four Voices. She has contributed writing to publications such as the Poetry Project Newsletter, Peripheral Review and The Felt, among others. Alisha holds an MFA in Writing from Pratt Institute, and is co-editor of READ: a journal of inter-translation.