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Speaking of History

By Simon Shieh

I don’t want to say too much

[           ]

Your absence made the train car redolent of history

[                                                                            ]     

The poem made so much of nothing

[                                                                                              ]

[History is rife with inconsistency]


History is [inconsistency]


You made a small hole in your sleeve that I could look through to see the flowers

(o)

You were there [           like a flower [       seen through a small hole [   in history ]

 


 

 

Listen as Simon Shieh reads Speaking of History.

Added: Friday, January 24, 2025  /  Used with permission.
Simon Shieh
Photo by Jojo Shieh.

Simon Shieh is the author of Master (Sarabande Books, 2023), winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize and the Norma Farber Award from the Poetry Society of America, and Finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize. His poems and essays are published in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Best New Poets, Guernica, and The Yale Review, among others, and have been recognized with a National Endowment for the Arts Literature fellowship and a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Simon is a co-founder of Spittoon Literary Magazine, which translates the best contemporary Chinese writing into English.

Image Description: Simon Shieh sits in front of a wooden door and gazes to the right. He wears a demin button-up with a black shirt underneath.

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