Untitled

By Jenny Zhang

Daddy issues have been coming up a lot lately for us, as a nation. I’m surely not the only one to notice we employ metaphors to make sense of the news. I always like to take note of who hides their origins and who shows them off. How do we form a coalition of resistance without obliterating our differences? Not all lives matter and we are not all the same immigrants. Rage can be so common it turns ambient. I’m drawn to the figure of the ungrateful subaltern as a trope in literature. In real life, it is often dangerous to demand more. While writing this poem, I indulged my pettiness, and in revising, I did my best to pull back.

Jenny Zhang is the author of the chapbook “Hags” and the poetry collection “Dear Jenny, We Are All Find.” Her debut story collection, “Sour Heart,” has just been published.