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bye bye

—after “American Pie,” sung by Leslie Cheung, a Cantopop star who died jumping off the 24th floor of the Mandarin Oriental, Hong Kong

 

boys always

haunting the gas

 

stationed at

the kum & go

 

come around yelling

happy july, all

 

these lives you haven’t filled

in all these teeth

 

a faith so deep you can

die in it, like a boy so

 

high up he thought the

swimming pool was full

 

and god willing, he

dived in it. in a

 

preemptive strike, patriotic, partirons                                                              

and party on! miss 中国

 

in 中西部,

i dismiss

 

their existence, a flotilla

with more in common

 

with a root beer vanilla

concoction than the

 

spanish armada, though

that too was a whipped

 

cream loss. dq stands

for disqualification—three

 

strikes & the cup is half

mosh pit half military

 

campaign—god is in the

good fizz—& the bottom

 

(beyond the caffeine &

fresh sugarcane) is concrete.

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Stella Wong

Stella Wong is a poet with degrees from Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Wong's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY, Colorado Review, Missouri Review, Narrative, Poetry Northwest, and The LA Review of Books. She is the author of American Zero, winner of the 2018 Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize, selected by Danez Smith, and Spooks, winner of the 2020 Saturnalia Books Editors Prize.