STEPHANIE YUE DUHEM / 2 POEMS

THE BEETLE

With his slick green
insect mouth, his
clicking mandibles, he says:
“It’s too late.”

The obstetrician has become
what he collects summers:
some anomalous beetle.
So I stick him through

with a nickel-plated
needle. Screw him to cork,
sit back. Dress his name
in the gamy gown

of Latin—a tongue
as dead as he, beneath
the white expertise
of my half-moon nails.

I wonder why he came
to this field if not to strew
bugsong—to unease
female ears, trilling discord.

Oh well. I begin to peel
his layers off: smug mouth,
then wings—just pages
of charts, chirring

decline! decline! decline!
I have half a mind
to crush his shell,
bleed his anonymity out

through a cracked old pen.
“Herr Doktor, you are
a tool—like all men.
But I am a moon.”

---

DMs

Are there therapists who specialize in helping people give up on their dreams?

The essence of humiliation is that the humiliator has a point.

My tragedy is, I want to be a muse but I’m only a writer.

Nobody’s perfect unless they’re fully compensating me.

You’re on a moral vanity trip like I’ve never seen.

Do you have a SoundCloud?

Fuck, I’m already so smart but imagine if I had never eaten seed oils.

Wearing clear heels to a Catholic sacrament is hot.

I’m having trouble finding poets as tall as Wallace Stevens.

Sorry, I don’t date sexual deviants.

Are you a woman?

Let’s take out huge loans together.

I don’t know this heaux, maybe it’s autofiction and maybe it isn’t.

If God doesn’t make us talk...

It wasn’t real.

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Stephanie Yue Duhem is a 1.5 generation Chinese-American poet and graduate of the New Writers Project MFA at UT Austin. She was a 2020 Best of the Net nominee and a 2021 and 2023 Pushcart nominee. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Bennington Review, Iterant, Southern Humanities Review, and many other journals. She can be found online at www.sydpoetry.com.