20 Apr Origin Story by Steven Duong
an invasive species of love which said
If this is how you live your life
perhaps you should live it elsewhere
& so I did
I lived it big
I lived it elsewhere
I placed my belongings
in a waterproof shell
said goodbye to the Asian carp
the kudzu vines
the bark beetles stripping the coast
of music
I became an invader myself
a pathogen with survival traits
I flooded the Mekong with plum wine
burned a hole in Shaanxi Province
I opened a small business
delivering small mammals
to the owners of piranhas
& when it went under I sank
to the bottom of Lake Malawi
rose finned & wealthy
The lake became a pond
became a tank became a bowl
I lived & I lived
For you I did it elsewhere
About the Poet
Steven Duong is the author of At the End of the World There Is a Pond, a debut poetry collection published by W. W. Norton. His poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Guernica, and the Yale Review, among other publications. His short fiction is featured in Catapult, The Drift, and The Best American Short Stories 2024. A creative writing fellow in poetry at Emory University, he lives in Atlanta, Georgia. This poem is the second poem in At the End of the World There Is a Pond and is republished by the permission of W.W. Norton.
Related Event
- Steven Duong will join poets Rachelle Toarmino, Diego Espíritu, Spencer Williams, and Mathilda Cullen in a reading at 6 p.m. on Monday, April 21 at Rust Belt Books, 415 Grant St., Buffalo. The reading will serve as the Buffalo stop for Steven Duong’s national tour for his debut collection At the End of the World There Is a Pond (Norton) and the Buffalo launch of Rachelle Toarmino’s new chapbook My Science (Sixth Finch Books).
The Poem of the Week feature is curated by literary legacy awardee R.D. Pohl.