Stella Wong

MANIFOLD

I like your body / which you don’t find
hot / and I like that about you. 

Me, a weepy lettuce / purply, nutrient deficient
scrunchy / hyperbolic plane

which you say maxes out surface
area / superficial / same in Latin.

An alumna suggests I findom / but sounds
like call girl / with bank receipts and jail.

The hyperbole form is desperate 
to escape / from me. Where

else / can you find my body / type
in cacti / coral / kelp

sponge / maybe pouty calla lilies
would help / meaning vaginas / hail

the giant / one in times square / literal 
center of the universe / super face

made out of magenta / acrylic 
nails / gemstones and you can’t find it

online. On your shoulder, I make brassy
trombone raspberries / we like to watch / men fold

men are lost / inside, called it 
a carapace / and a hot pink

metallic fountain. On top / it’s fluted. No
really, the universe is a hyperboloid.

Of all the multidimensional / spaces,

bloopers, crying / through
this orchestra is hijinks enough.

STELLA WONG is the author of Stem (Princeton University Press, 2024), Spooks (Saturnalia, 2022), winner of the Saturnalia Books Editors Prize, and American Zero, selected for the Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize by Danez Smith. A graduate of Harvard, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Columbia, Wong’s poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Colorado Review, Poetry, Lana Turner, and Prairie Schooner.