Extraordinary poems come together to build Như Xuân Nguyễn’s A System of Satellites, a chapbook that is relentless in its elegance, restless in its truths, and one that questions what we must do to remain our most permanent selves inside all the man-made gerrymanderings of gender, race, nation—false constructions that almost always refuse to see those of us on the margins, no matter how bright our reflections.
—Adrian Matejka
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Chapbooks
A System of Satellites by Như Xuân Nguyễn
Edition: 500 copies of the winning books were printed by the Prolific Group and designed by Gabriele Wilson, with covers by John Gall.
$8.00
The Moon of Makemake
S/2015 (136472) 1 or MK 2
What happens if I do want children?
One hundred eggs to divide
between the mountains and the sea?
When the doctor went over
the consent form,
he told me I should assume—
irreversible body
changes. I’ve snapped
off all my ends. My blood pools
in a valley and travels
nowhere else.
I could have frozen the possibility
of a child with my mother’s eyes
but I couldn’t wait.
I didn’t want to pay. I ended
a history of reproduction
perhaps four billion years long
with an aesthetics
against instinct.
I can never be a mother
and I can be a mother
to anything but a child
with half of the memories
that conceived me—
like any woman I can work from the body
an outcome I can’t control,
a portrait of a moon
as dark as charcoal, a life all its own,
a series of marks showing
where I choose to hurt.
All rights reserved. Reprinted with the permission of the author.
