Axioms by Sharon Wang


This is what they memorized:

Glass is more transparent
than wood and air even more transparent
than glass.

A dot an inch from the right and a dot
an inch from the left
can be brought together by folding:
an elimination of space.

The end song of a tree is slower than
the end song of a mechanical grasshopper.

If you hold a sugar cube in your hand,
sometimes a man will eat from it.

Meanwhile they were growing light.
They didn’t even know it.

They could have walked into the sickle lake
with a pitcher of milk and that alone
would have been enough to sink them.

 

Sharon Wang‘s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in DIAGRAM, The Antioch Review, Anti-, The Collagist, and The Pinch. A graduate of Washington University in St. Louis’ MFA program, she lives in Chicago and works as an arts grant writer.