Associate Editor Madeleine Wattenberg: In Sean Cho A.’s “At night: maybe sleeping,” nouns travel through qualifiers and shifting syntactical constructions: “Hopefully, / the trees do not, have not / will not land / on anyone’s home.” By the poem’s end, the concept of “home” is destabilized and precarious. What is to be done when one kind of homemaking destroys another? The reader is ultimately implicated in this displacement: “no chickens have emerged / from their chilled eggs in your house.”
To hear Sean read his piece, click here:
At night: maybe sleeping
Some trees are falling,
will fall, have fallen.
There may be many finches
suddenly displaced
without homes. Hopefully,
the trees do not, have not
will not land
on anyone’s home.
The refrigerator sighs
and takes a break.
However, no chickens have emerged
from their chilled eggs in your house
but, elsewhere, yes,
elsewhere: many chickens, thankfully
none of which see trees
and think home.
Sean Cho A. is the author of “American” Home (Autumn House, 2021), winner of the Autumn House Press chapbook contest. His work can be future-found or ignored in Copper Nickel, The Penn Review, Massachusetts Review, Nashville Review, among others. He is an MFA candidate at UCI. Find him @phlat_soda.
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