YEAR 2025 Poem: A Good Poem, by Isabelle Lee

I go to church on Fridays now.
On the walk over I spray perfume on my wrists and rehearse my lines,
When I bow my head there are no bells to distract me.
The pastor’s wife scolds me for my makeup, my perfume,
tells me to give my mother a call.
You’ve become 老外 (“foreigner”), she says,
you worry too much about the world,
and you forget God and your mother.
For a moment I think she might be right, but then
the worship team plays an old hymn
from when I was five, maybe, or fifteen,
and I am reminded that I have never forgotten anything.
I smoke a cigarette on the walk back.

In class I argue in my second language
about what it means to be a good person.
I will never win this argument, I can
use esoteric words,
quote Ovid and Augustine in Latin,
but they are not forgetting that I am an Asian girl
who goes to church on Sundays Fridays.
Some arguments can only be won by the right people.
The white girls look surprised when I say fuck,
I want them to see me smoke a cigarette.

My life in America sums up to this:
a continuous attempt to justify my presence.
A man told me I do not understand beauty,
so now I write poetry to prove him wrong.
I have proven nothing thus far,
I do not know what makes a good poem,
just like I do not know what makes a good person,
or a good daughter.
I came to this country believing in a monstrous world,
and it is very big indeed.
To be a person big enough for it
one must forget some things,
or become more persons.

A man told me I love you
but he was looking past me,
at the writing on the wall,
or at the me in the other room.
A man told me it was finished,
and I relearned what my father taught me ages ago:
there is no graceful way to become unloved.
I have tried so hard to grow up I have started growing sideways.

But this is what they don’t tell us:
the world is as big and small as you choose.
You can have your small world,
you can have many worlds,
if you want it.
You have to really, really want it.

I call my mother and tell her,
that I have had my heart broken in the land of opportunity,
that I am learning how to mold my grievances into something
a little more human,
that I am realizing how to be many things all at once
without splitting into a million pieces.
How American, she replies,
Richard’s sister got into Yale.

These days I make the air lighter to breathe.
I practice growing.
I practice losing.
I practice knowing some things.
I still do not know what makes a good poem,
and maybe I never will.
I write one anyway.