in april orion hangs up his belt like

Kyra Jee

unpinning a name, & slips off-stage

into a buckshot of foreign bodies
into a glass-bottomed boat
into luminous garbage

behind the pacific
where he can go & have a smoke
or a hard lemonade

he’s sick & lonely of being counted
on. accounted for. the camera a buckshot now
to the fine glass filigree of blood pressure

in april he wants to pick up & run forever
pick up 2,700 years of linen shirts off the cabin floor
pick up where he left off while he was still broke, confidently able

to name the groupers & sheepheads & rockfish
nestling into the kelp belt like so much
gorgeous refuse. he wants to be good

at something other than being noticed
good for something other than being seen
he wants to try a jet ski wants a birth certificate with two signatures

wants the other chair at his kitchen table
to hold more than the mail he wants to go
fishing. but not that kind of fishing; he doesn’t eat—

he lays facedown in that glass-bottomed boat
to watch it all happen & don’t mind the irony
cave-diving parasailing he wants to let go

of the dome & drop down, melt into its belly
worst of all he kind of wants to be known for that too
next november when his contract is renewed

he’ll have to make a choice, or get to
but it’s always the same pen & the same blue hands
& three gold medals the dot-dot-dot bisecting him eastward & west

---

Kyra Jee is a Chinese-American poet from California. Her work has

been published in Magpie Zine, Harbor Review, Scribendi, for which it

received the Western Regional Honors Council Award for Poetry,

The Allegheny Review, and elsewhere. One of the greatest writerly

decisions she has ever made (so far, at least) was serving on the

editorial board of a lit mag—she hopes to do so again someday.