18 Aug ORDINARY TROUBLE by Diana Cao
why I started this poem. So I abandon it.
Today’s news sequence looks like
yesterday’s. There’s nothing to write
home about: Love is love? Big ideas
are a sleight of hand, untroubled
by an after. I’m healthily troubled,
according to my therapist. It’s natural to forget,
Holly says, that spring can feel like the end of it:
drunk bees flowering like last time, like
it’s the last time. The deranged bees have it right.
When it comes, the end will appear as another bright idea,
not an emergency exit. My worst ideas
don’t get much air in therapy, where my trouble
comes from realizing what I want to forget
has a life of its own. Not every poem can be a hit.
What you recall isn’t what it was like.
There s violence, too, in getting it right
most of the time. I’m done trying to be right
most of the time. The marketplace of ideas
inflates whenever I check on it. Trouble
still finds me, finds me though I swear to forget
it, swear not to know what I know, swear it
was a different poem where I acted like
there was an order to things, wrote it like
you too could see it. Like a writer
in seasonal disorder, every idea
is hollow if you’re in deep enough. There’s trouble
and then there’s trouble. I forget
if seasonal means every season in this climate.
I wish I could put my finger on the it of it—
the reason I started this poem. Reader, I like you. Like
you, there are times I think I’m mostly right.
I find my mistakes in the repetition, ideas
worn in the mind by rhyme. You’re troubled
for a moment by its echo. Then you forget.
About the Poet
Diana Cao is a writer whose poetry and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. Her first chapbook, Relational, was the winner of Sixth Finch’s 2024 annual chapbook contest.
She is Just Buffalo Literary Center’s 2024 Poetry Fellow, selected by Megan Fernandes, and also a winner of Nimrod International’s 2023 Neruda Prize. Her work has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and International Literary Seminars. She is the poetry editor of The Boiler, a journal of new literature.
As a researcher and data scientist, her writing has been featured in Lawfare and the Healthy Elections Project out of Stanford Law School and MIT. Cao is currently a JD candidate at Harvard Law School.
Related Event
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- On Aug. 31 at 7:30 p.m., Diana Cao, winner of the 2024 Just Buffalo Poetry Fellowship, will join award-winning poet Megan Fernandes as featured performers at a Just Buffalo Literary Center Silo City Reading Series event also featuring a musical performance by DJ B-Cutz and flutist Dayatra Amber; and a choreographed roller skating and visual art installation curated by Barrett Gordon (The WASH Project), in collaboration with DJ Carr, Mandela Huff, Drew Huff (unrelated) and Aye Thant.Silo City Reading Series events take place in Marine A grain elevator, behind Duende at Silo City, 85 Silo City Row. Doors open at 7 p.m., and the events begin at 7:30 p.m. Books by featured poets in the series will be available for purchase by Buffalo bookseller Fitz Books.
The Poem of the Week feature is curated by literary legacy awardee R.D. Pohl.