Published in Issue 64.2: Spring 2025
You can purchase our Spring issue here
So much of what I’ve learned in therapy I first learned in poetry.
They call me a “Dreamer”, but really I’m an insomniac
with night terrors, kept awake by fears of being abandoned
by the Dept. of Homeland Security. There were no secure attachments
I could form to this country. I had only alienable rights.
“Unremovable alien” they deemed me for a time, and I was proud
of what that implied about my stubbornness, my refusal.
Better that than a “model citizen” people pleaser, a brown-nosing
assimilationist. I live hard. I’m invasive. Nothing alien is alien to me.
Born in the year of the metal goat, ANNI LIU is the author of Border Vista (Persea Books), which won the Lexi Rudnitsky Prize and was a New York Times Best Poetry Book of 2022. She’s the recipient of an Undocupoets Fellowship, a Djanikian Scholarship from the Adroit Journal, and residencies at Civitella Ranieri, the Anderson Center, and University of the Arts. She’s an editor at Graywolf Press and lives in Philadelphia.
