Stephanie Choi 
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Erased Palm Revelation

night peels back its crystal crusted eyes
this is the hour of black coffee 

and milk biscuits. of charred logs 
and spider legs. sky a gray pool,

morning wounds you 
already awake. air serrated

by silence. yesterday’s hours 
spent angry with each other 

nailed to the walls. from ground
to ceiling the ruby rounds 

unevenly mapped. elsewhere 
an engine starts, startles 

​the birds. and winged fingers
again reach for one another.

---

emergent nobody

​this obsession with nobody. emily negates the body 
through which the song rises, mitski needs her body 
negated to make the song. it’s not true 
that i’m a nobody too, not true that i have 
nobody. i have at least a handful of people 
who’d answer if i called, at least two waiting 
for my call. i have a book, a good job. i love 
to feel sad and sorry for myself 
like Mitski. i never call. i don’t 
want to be a frog. i think 
of my best lines staring out 
the window above the kitchen sink,
eating alone. season 12, episode 6 
of Law and Order: SVU quotes emily, 
turns her wry ecstasy into the survivor’s 
traumatic memory. do i love this show 
because i’m reminded at least this isn’t 
happening to me, or because i wish 
something would happen to me? i worry 
all the sorrow i’ve ever felt 
has been manufactured to make these poems. 
i just need one good honest 
life-altering email. the difference 
between i am nobody and i have nobody--
to claim oneself as, to lament oneself 
as not having. these days i’m never
sated—is it me, or inflation? when i
open the window, all the goldfinches flutter away. 

---

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Stephanie Choi's poems appear in Blackbird, Copper Nickel, Electric Literature, New Ohio Review, and elsewhere. Her debut collection, The Lengest Neoi, was selected by Brenda Shaughnessy for the 2023 Iowa Poetry Prize and published in 2024. She was the 2023-24 Poet-in-Residence at Sewanee and is an Assistant Professor of English at Oklahoma State University.