Weekly Poem: ‘Never Seen’

By Hoa Nguyen

Never seen a corncrake
an ochre cry to screen

makes the evening chill a chord
to sandhill      string and feel

wind of wing beats
in your face

Face the never-stumble
   for throwing yourself so

sprightly     What can’t stay
late in the month:

dolphin fetuses       not birds
washing up in numbers

Born in the Mekong Delta and raised in the Washington, D.C., area, Hoa Nguyen studied poetics at New College of California in San Francisco. With the poet Dale Smith, Nguyen founded Skanky Possum, a poetry journal and book imprint in Austin, Texas, where they lived for 14 years. The author of eight books and chapbooks, she currently lives in Toronto, where she teaches poetics in a private workshop and at Ryerson University. Wave Books published her third full-length collection of poems, “As Long As Trees Last,” in September 2012.