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      May 9, 2016DissonanceJenny Qi

      The woman is the one who loses
      when a relationship ends, warns my father,
      my father who had never been with a woman
      before he married my mother at twenty-eight
      and later made an online dating profile
      using a photo taken the day of her funeral
      because it was his only recent photo in a suit,
      my father who had never been alone
      in fifty-four years.
       
      I wonder when he says this if he is thinking
      of the man my mother loved before him,
      if she told him how it hurt the first time
      she knew love could deceive, how
      experience blunted her next disappointment.
      Or is he thinking of their second decade,
      his palm slamming hollowly on the plastic
      kitchen table, her threats of divorce empty
      except of venom. I wonder if he noticed
      the ragged edge in the yellow pages,
      long list of attorneys missing. If he knew
      about the envelope beneath the mattress,
      a thousand dollars in tips folded neatly
      over a creamy white business card.

      from #51 - Spring 2016

      Jenny Qi

      “Trying to explain why I identify as a feminist poet is like trying to explain why I identify as human. Perhaps the most honest explanation is that my mother was the kind of woman who knocked on every door of a university until she got her first job after immigrating to the U.S., and she was the kind of woman who said, ‘If I had raised that friend of yours, he would have grown a spine.’ She was also the kind of woman who worked two shifts and, instead of collapsing into a bed, stood outside my third grade classroom to make sure I’d gotten to school. My mother was my first best friend, and she died when I was nineteen. Everything I’ve written since then has a bit of her in it.”

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