Feature Poet: Gavin Yuan Gao

Mangroves, or a Treatise on Ecological Inheritance

Faceless, of one mind, we have come to know the depth of our own blood— not the luxurious blue of sirens or the lightning green of pond lilies, but brackish as the spitting sea that will outlive us—ringing ruthless shadows as desire rings the earth’s flesh. The heart is a long ladder, a mirrored & sleeved things. Our tongues have relished the sweetness of this year’s magnificence, our faith lush & razor-edged. Out of the clear calm, a shock of roots—hands of a virtuoso climb & astonish. Here, in the north, our beauty besieges winter. Men tread trees’ memory brazenly as tyrants do, not knowing the woodland is our birthright, where the sun is all mouths & the river writes her elegy on our limbs tirelessly with her ink of light. Watch us toss & lurch as a leafy coliseum under sky’s metallic sheen, each honest self burrowing deep, making a claim on what is ours to inherit.

Meadow

In my body’s rain-scented cavern, night loosens its mouth’s well-oiled hinge. The man who dived deep beneath my skin & emptied out his sudden pearls now lies shipwrecked & desireless beside me, silence between our bodies a meadow I can’t bring myself to cross. O wind-twisted magnolia, who diligently paved my window with sweetness all summer, teach me how to be marked by faith without being swallowed by its light. I should confess that when he came inside me like the softest knife I’ve ever felt, all I could think of was my mother’s throat lit by the thistle moon’s white fire years ago—as she tied around her cool flesh a necklace strung with the pointed bullets she’d picked from my father’s drawer, when the field outside bristled with anticipation of autumn (though it was not yet the end of summer, no, not yet) & it was still easy to believe that the blue flame of the cicadas’ song among the high leaves would go on & on.

Born in Beijing, Gavin Yuan Gao is a genderqueer, bilingual immigrant poet who grew up in Beijing and Brisbane. They hold a BA (magna cum laude) in English Literature and Creative Writing from The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. They live in Brisbane. At the Altar of Touch, their first book, recently won the 2023 Prize for Poetry at the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards. These poems are taken from that collection.