Hope is a thing with a name and
I am personality calculator.
I hunted for you in Internet lists.
This stranger sea—each route
too wayward by edges and vowel.
A name is a settled, still home
for the indefinite. Unknown love-
born, murky-watered babe, let
me call you Nothing. Mix in salt,
melody, and ventilate. Voila:
elegy for an exact flaw, for self-
knowing. We are only here for a
short time. You have ten fingers and
ten toes, I have a black-and-white.
In it, your head is cast down from
direct view—your face obscured.
Jessica Q. Stark a mixed-race, Vietnamese American poet working and living in Durham, North Carolina. She is a doctoral candidate in English at Duke University, where she writes on comics in poetry and curates the Little Corner Poetry Reading Series. Her chapbook, The Liminal Parade, was selected by Dorothea Lasky for Heavy Feather’s Double Take Poetry Prize in 2016. A mini poetry chapbook, “Vasilisa the Wise,” is forthcoming with Ethel in 2018. Her first full-length poetry book, Savage Pageant, is forthcoming with Birds LLC. She writes an ongoing love poem for the Internet in her poetry zine, INNANET.