American Lục Bát For the End of The World [At Long Last, At Least We Have Our Language?] or The Final Sonnet
To begin, let us end
this sentence with no friends or en-
emies. Just wrong destin-
ations to sad desks in Am-
hurst. What hurts most is lambs
kicking the few iambs warmly
into the fire. We
began with the easy single us & look at us now— full
of we & us & stool sample
compost of language. Will
we last? Last within [the mill] of line
& syntax from behind
grammar that’s not designed for us.
Added: Wednesday, December 21, 2022 / Poem used with permission.
Photo by Marina Leigh.
Joshua Nguyen is the author of Come Clean (University of Wisconsin Press), winner of the 2021 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, the 2021 Writers' League of Texas Discovery Award, and the 2022 Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters Poetry Award. He is also the author of the chapbook, American Lục Bát for My Mother (Bull City Press, 2021). He is a Vietnamese-American writer, a collegiate national poetry slam champion (CUPSI), and a Kundiman Fellow. He is the Wit Tea co-editor for The Offing Mag, the Kundiman South co-chair, a bubble tea connoisseur, and loves a good pun. He received his MFA/PhD from The University of Mississippi and currently teaches poetry at Tufts University.
Image Description: Joshua Nguyen wearing a white henley, looking over his shoulder to his left. He is standing in a Mississippi field, under a tree, with the shadows of the tree on parts of his face.
