#Cynthia Dewi Oka

[lifeinpoetry]

I am / dust or nothing.

— Cynthia Dewi Oka, from "Diplomacy," A Tinderbox in Three Acts

[lillyli-74]

Photography by Rob Olivier

She grew into a forest, she could not be found.

~Cynthia Dewi Oka

[smokefalls]

We are all beneficiaries of a sun that rises and sets with or without us.

Cynthia Dewi Oka, "Window #033" from A Tinderbox in Three Acts

[weltenwellen]

Cynthia Dewi Oka, from "First Poem After Parting"

[theothermajnoo]

We are all beneficiaries of a sun that rises and sets with or without us."

—Cynthia Dewi Oka

[the-final-sentence]

Ghosts light up her life.

Cynthia Dewi Oka, from “Manifest”

[jumping-jackalope]

some of my favorites have been

Natalie Diaz vs. the Lexicon

Jamila Woods vs. The Remedy

Ada Limón vs. Epiphany

Cynthia Dewi Oka vs. Spectacle

George Abraham vs. Returning

VS

The VS podcast is a bi-weekly series where poets confront the ideas that move them. Hosted by poets Danez Smith and Franny Choi, produced by Daniel Kisslinger, and presented by the Poetry Foundation and Postloudness.

*

I am once again recommending this podcast for anyone who enjoys poetry!

[literarycatchall]

That a potholed street in the middling borough of Collingswood, New Jersey bears the name Atlantic, after an all-consuming body of water. That all-consuming is Atlas’ curse to bear the heavens on his shoulders. That after the fall of the gods, half of the heavens is darkness. That inside the car speeding down the street, I believe I am safe from being halved. That “I” am not a white box, but a body of water. That white is a pattern of boys who expect to live long enough to become men. That some of these boys are whistling by on their bikes, and behind them, clear as a dream, welcome candles in the windows framed by blooms of vervain. That “welcome” means I thought I was not afraid of the dark. Since the jade scrubs of the cancer ward. Since the florescent grid of the factory and the vista of small bones in my father’s collar while I was interpreting for the twenty-something-year-old white citizen,                                 “Tell your dad he can quit or I can fire him.” Grief had already burst its cocoon; it ate him like an army of moths from the inside. That brown men and women kept stitching jackets under the heavens of the machines. Welcome. That a moth is trapped in the car with me – it will die, but I do not want to practice florescence alone. Like a first language bleeding hearts call, speaking truth to power. I don’t know how they don’t know that power doesn’t care. That watching fires go out will become a pattern. That fire is everywhere, and therefore, cheap. That the hole in my foundation is all-consuming and at its bottom a frangipani tree opens its yellow hands. That POLICE ICE is printed in yellow or white on the jacket of the night. That the night walks freely among the ranks of the sun. That a body of water parted once like a red skirt then sealed over the armored horses of Egypt. That Whitney Houston is a bone blasting out the car windows. That tonight, the night after, the night after that, for as long as the distance between god and a pothole, a moth’s flight will spell,                                 “They are coming for you.”

“Redacted from a Know-Your-Rights Training Agenda—,” Cynthia Dewi Oka (2018)

[slateblueearthbelow]

he reaches in the end what he had to begin with: fingertips           on corrupted tissue, cathedral

of octaves in his thinning           breath, tears like small stubborn gods refusing to fall.

excerpt from: Portrait of My Father as a Pianist | Cynthia Dewi Oka

[lifeinpoetry]

I am a girl not a razor blade please let me hold more than onions and windows with no one I can see behind them

— Cynthia Dewi Oka, from "Window #033," A Tinderbox in Three Acts

[litcelebrasian]

New Releases: December Books by Asian Authors

The team at Lit CelebrAsian are always bookmarking books before the end of the year. Note: This is just a small sample of releases out in December, so let us know what books you’re excited for! (more…)

[smokefalls]

In this sense, reading might be more dangerous than writing. In the flame that sits in the box of human wire, many writers have been lost to the air that is also lost. Not because they wrote, but because someone might read what they wrote. The reader may have choices the writer does not. In this sense, the reader may be the true agent of history.

Cynthia Dewi Oka, "Window #033" from A Tinderbox in Three Acts

[capjuby]

Portrait de mon père en pianiste || Cynthia Dewi Oka

Derrière les rideaux désinfectés           au-delà de la touche de levant dévorant l’or terrible

          des feuilles, un homme pourrait être sa propre nuit éternelle. La ville           de décombres plane, sa

hauteur survivant un noir envol           de notes : l’éclat de ses dents une lame et le plus vieux des anesthésiques.

          Echappé l’inculpé, il grimpe les yeux fous, une main hors -           courant quatre à quatre sur les rails

de son Steinway brisé. Qui           n’a pas été jugé coupable d’un cri de corneille  – le rêve

           d’un départ emplumé qu’on n’a pas mérité, puis la chute           en bas de la grouillance des fausses notes

de la chair ? La mémoire recule           vers un nocturne, un royaume né d’épines et de lumière faiblissant –

          il atteint à la fin ce avec quoi il avait commencé : pulpe des doigts            sur tissu corrompu, cathédrale

d’octaves dans la dilution           de son souffle, des larmes comme de petits dieux têtus refusant de tomber.

[weltenwellen]

Cynthia Dewi Oka, from "Redacted from a Know-Your-Rights Training Agenda—"

[brandonshimoda]

THE BOOKS I READ IN 2022, in the order in which I read them (*books I read before, that I was reading again):

Alexandra Chang, Days of Distraction 

Elizabeth Miki Brina, Speak, Okinawa 

Cynthia Dewi Oka, Fire Is Not a Country 

Hanif Abdurraqib, Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest 

*Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings 

Victoria Chang, Dear Memory 

*Etel Adnan, Of Cities & Women (Letters to Fawwaz)

Sun Yung Shin, The Wet Hex 

traci kato-kiriyama, Navigating With(out) Instruments 

Raquel Gutiérrez, Brown Neon

Solmaz Sharif, Customs 

*Etel Adnan, Journey to Mount Tamalpais 

Lucille Clifton, Generations: A Memoir 

Emerson Whitney, Heaven 

Kim Thúy, em, tr. Sheila Fischman 

Angel Dominguez, Desgraciado (the collected letters) 

Janice Lee, Separation Anxiety 

*Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee

*Cathy Park Hong, Translating Mo’um 

Kyoko Hayashi, From Trinity to Trinity, tr. Eiko Otake 

Lao Yang, Pee Poems, tr. Joshua Edwards & Lynn Xu 

Yuri Herrera, A Silent Fury: The El Bordo Mine Fire, tr. Lisa Dillman (

Mai Der Vang, Yellow Rain

Chuang Hua, Crossings 

José Watanabe, Natural History, tr. Michelle Har Kim

Walter Lew, Excerpts from: ∆IKTH 딕테/딕티 DIKTE, for DICTEE (1982) 

*Bhanu Kapil, The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers 

Vasily Grossman, An Armenian Sketchbook, tr. Robert & Elizabeth Chandler

Hiromi Kawakami, Parade, tr. Allison Markin Powell 

Lynn Xu, And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight 

*Etel Adnan, Sitt Marie Rose, tr. Georgina Kleege 

Jennifer Soong, Suede Mantis/Soft Rage 

*James Baldwin, No Name in the Street 

*Hilton Als, The Women

Dot Devota, >She 

V.S. Naipaul, The Return of Eva Perón 

Yasushi Inoue, The Hunting Gun, tr. Sadamichi Yokoo and Sanford Goldstein

Molly Murakami, Tide goes out 

Adrian Tomine, Shortcomings 

Hisham Matar, A Month in Siena 

Leia Penina Wilson, Call the Necromancer 

Gabriel García Márquez, News of a Kidnapping, tr. Edith Grossman 

Amitava Kumar, Bombay-London-New York 

Elizabeth Alexander, The Trayvon Generation 

Ryan Nakano, I Am Minor 

Constance Debré, Love Me Tender, tr. Holly James 

Hilton Als, My Pin-up 

Victoria Chang, The Trees Witness Everything 

Leslie Kitashima-Gray, The Pink Dress: A Story from the Japanese American Internment 

Emmanuel Carrère, Yoga, tr. John Lambert 

Ronald Tanaka, The Shino Suite: Sansei Poetry 

Patricia Y. Ikeda, House of Wood, House of Salt

Soichi Furuta, to breathe 

Kiki Petrosino, Bright 

Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Aerial Concave Without Cloud 

Nanao Sakaki, Real Play

Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias 

Francis Naohiko Oka, Poems 

Geraldine Kudaka, Numerous Avalanches at the Point of Intersection 

Steve Fujimura, Sad Asian Music 

Augusto Higa Oshiro, The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu, tr. Jennifer Shyue 

Julie Otsuka, The Swimmers 

Salman Rushdie, The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey 

Margo Jefferson, Constructing a Nervous System 

Hua Hsu, Stay True 

Barbara Browning, The Miniaturists 

Kate Zambreno, Drifts 

*Julie Otsuka, When The Emperor Was Divine 

Louise Akers, Elizabeth/The Story of Drone

Wong May, In the Same Light: 200 Poems for Our Century from the Migrants & Exiles of the Tang Dynasty 

Gabrielle Octavia Rucker, Dereliction 

Trung Le Nguyen, The Magic Fish 

Jessica Au, Cold Enough for Snow 

Tongo Eisen-Martin, Blood on the Fog 

Lucas de Lima, Tropical Sacrifice 

*Like a New Sun: New Indigenous Mexican Poetry, ed. Víctor Terán & David Shook 

Billy-Ray Belcourt, A Minor Chorus 

Kazim Ali, Silver Road 

*Sadako Kurihara, When We Say Hiroshima, tr. Richard Minear 

Simone White, or, on being the other woman

*James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work 

Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes 

*Raquel Gutiérrez, Brown Neon 

Marguerite Duras, The Man Sitting in the Corridor 

Gayl Jones, Corregidora 

*Bhanu Kapil, The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers 

*Etel Adnan, Seasons 

Gwendolyn Brooks, to disembark 

Cristina Rivera Garza, The Taiga Syndrome, tr. Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana

Gwendolyn Brooks, In the Mecca 

Nona Fernández, The Twilight Zone, tr. Natasha Wimmer

Selva Almada, Dead Girls, tr. Annie McDermott

*Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee

Valerie Hsiung, To Love an Artist

*Theresa Hak  Cha, Exilée and Temps Morts

Dao Strom, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People

Randa Jarrar, Love Is An Ex-Country

*Dao Strom, Instrument

Osamu Dazai, Early Light, tr. Ralph McCarthy and Donald Keene

Osamu Dazai, The Setting Sun, tr. Donald Keene

Rachel Aviv, Strangers To Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us

Mahmoud Darwish, Journal of an Ordinary Grief, tr. Ibrahim Muhawi

[fatbeanbun]

Manifest

Cynthia Dewi Oka

The migrant feminist will not show you all her faces. The migrant feminist thinks in generations; in this sense, death is necessarily 
a comma. The migrant feminist washes, feeds, builds, plucks, sets ablaze, digs, flays, rips, dries, paints, kneads, wipes, testifies, lies, brays, stabs, crawls, lubricates, trims, guts, slaps, mantles, damns, disturbs. The migrant feminist hears cicadas and (mis)takes them for a theory of what comes and goes, for waking. The migrant feminist is unattached to ancestors and their judgments like spoiled fruit. The migrant feminist rewrites passive sentences in the night revealing 
subject, predicate, object while the baby sucks on her. The migrant feminist weeps at the stupidest things: a boy in the food court, his plate of spaghetti splattered on the ground. The father is yelling and 
yelling. The boy’s whole being is hunger. The migrant feminist laughs. The migrant feminist practices a different faith for every language she speaks. English, the mother of order. Bahasa, the eternity of boats. The migrant feminist forgives, ruthlessly. The migrant feminist makes not being a hero work. The migrant feminist is a kite in the wind, and the wind. The migrant feminist studies other people’s histories of themselves, because what one cannot have, one cherishes. The migrant feminist makes no claims on land. The migrant feminist makes love to hyperbole. The migrant feminist is the simultaneity of swirling things and electrified wire. Therefore, a passion for windows, an interrogative stance toward bolt-cutters. The migrant feminist chooses whom she belongs to. Ghosts light up her life.