Jane Wong

Nothing Else

Jersey smokestacks cover my face like shaving cream,
like my father coughing up a lung in the drunk

morning fog. Come home to Jersey, the lung says,
that big balloon. Come home to gutted car doors

with their wings off, to flies of no October, each
compound eye roving to make a mess. Tell me,

what have you learned from loneliness? Whose spoon
do you lick? Whose beds do you leave in brightly lit

corridors? Home has a tendency to demand answers.
Instead, I lob my shame away from me like dough

that simply won’t rise. Instead, I become a deep-sea
dweller, translucent umbrella. I float out, jellyfish of

doom and awe, buoyed by myself and nothing else.

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Jane Wong’s poems can be found in places such as Best American Poetry 2015, Best New Poets 2012, Pleiades, Third Coast, and others. A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of scholarships and fellowships from the U.S. Fulbright Program, the Fine Arts Work Center, Squaw Valley, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is the author of the book Overpour (Action Books, 2016). This fall, she will be an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Western Washington University.