Cathy Park Hong's first book, Translating Mo'um, was published in 2002 by Hanging Loose Press. Her second collection, Dance Dance Revolution, was chosen for the Barnard Women Poets Prize and was published in 2007 by WW Norton. Hong is also the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Village Voice Fellowship for Minority Reporters. Her poems have been published in A Public Space, Paris Review, Poetry, American Letters & Commentary, Denver Quarterly, Jubilat, and other journals, and she has reported for the Village Voice, The Guardian, Salon, and Christian Science Monitor. She now lives in New York City and is an Assistant Professor at Sarah Lawrence College.

Purchase her book, Dance Dance Revolution, and check out her website, www.cathyparkhong.com. Her latest work can be found online in conjunctions and octopus.

Year of the Pig

8.1
Brother, we were thralled by massif dead pigs floating
downriver     we hauled  butchered   feasted
then squalled for it was rotted meat.
Feeblest of bipeds we were but monks prayed for us,  
cured us of our rankled bodies.
Now the new observatory’s been ransacked for its myths,
the telescope         shattered to a million bifocals
the furrier uses em now to sew tiny rabbit mitts
w’hayseed beads for forcep babes
of the landlord foe.

10.1
We found out who it was: during hellswelt summer, his pigs
turned spotted & keeled over all at once
the ground was already cramped with the buried,
so his limp daughter & he threw the loadsome rotted crits
into the river
&the river slewed them down to us.

Brother, we tried him & decided he was guilty.

year of the rat:  10 yields of sorghum.
year of the dragon: 10 yields of sorghum.
year of the dog:  1 yield of sorghum.

year of the monkey:  a drought. A lowland huckster arose
&told us our idle highland’s perfect for his eye to all the stars,
an observatory that will attract pilgrims from afar. 
We will all profiteer.    Like fools, we sell.

year of the snake:  a  fraud telescope that shewed
not the promised swirling world of million distant suns
We line to look & see nothing but the flat hazen sky
We always see when we strike our loam.

10.15
I am covetous of you & curse our birth order, 
I long for lightspeed Shangdu.
Brother, imagine me.

I till & till our slender plot from daybreak to cinder dusk.
When you write about the four hundred string lights,
You & your new wife hurting w’laughter
on a paddleboat

do you know your laughter carries isself to our lornsome hills
&flushes my ears when I feed
Ma her broth?

Can I join you, Brother? Do you have room for me?

4.5

Ma has passed   the village gathered & wailed with trumpet lungs,
while I daydreamed of leaving these parched shriven hills,
traveling far into the mirror cast of Shangdu’s
pindle lights,

Then that melon bellied landlord a genius
for making tithes, skulked by & tithed me, tithed the grievers,
who quickly scrambled to escape the tithe,

tithed our Ma for the burial.
Even the dead don’t escape the tithe.

5.5

year of the pig:  at last the rain has come
for days it slews so the green, the mossclung trees,
&teastained dotted moths.

I've tilled the bit of unsold land.
I've tilled tilled done what I've been told.
Brother, I've tilled tilled always done,
I've always done what I've been told.

Brother, why have you not written?
Brother, can I join you?