Adrienne Su is the author of two collections of poetry, Middle Kingdom (Alice James, 1997) and Sanctuary (Manic D Press, forthcoming in April 2006). She received a Reader’s Choice Award from Prairie Schooner for three poems that appeared in its Winter 2004 issue, and recently published poems in Eclipse and Literature and Belief. She teaches at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where she also coordinates a guerilla poetry campaign called Poetry Is Not a Luxury.

Sometime in the second year, I saw it:
her consciousness, fully separate
from all I said and did for her,
from every event that was to come.
It was almost a spirit, except it was trapped
in a small, seemingly inexperienced body.

There were ways in which I could encourage it.
I could read out loud until my tongue ached,
make two hundred pancakes shaped like animals,
sing, and hold her as she drifted off.
But if it had already chosen sadness
or loneliness or cruelty,

any wisdom I had managed to collect
in the decades I had on her would be baby oil
on bathwater; my words, on walking out,
would twist their ankles. Still, I said my best ones,
which, if written down, would have to be revised
a hundred times, and mostly discarded.

© Adrienne Su 2006.