poems by Sylvia Chong

How can I write the love story of a woman I don't know? There must be more than cerebration, more than the skillful plotting of my thoughts. A song, a drunken look, a light remembered . . . but will the brewed blend have flavor?

Recollection is not enough.  Perhaps I must pound the table, be harsh, be loud-tongued, to make what never happened assume its own reality.

-- M.F.K. Fisher, The Gastronomical Me

• For the Man My Father Might Have Chosen
• Dumpling-Making
• On the birth of my mother
• Creation Story

• Control Groups

• Sestina for an Old Lover
• Birth-Pains
• Desire (a trilogy)
• Discourse at Midnight
• Premature Love Poem
• Ritual: The Last Morning
• Countenance
• Bodily Necessities
• Airplane Poem (A Fortnight Away)
• Space Walk
• Various Haiku

• Am I a Woman?
• lilith
• Suite: Night/Dance in the Horizon
• fantasies & foreigners & frontierlands
• On Flirting w/Virtue
• Four Variations Upon a Question
• Searching for Venus and Adonis

• The Storyteller
• Intimacy