Duy Doan is the author of the forthcoming collection We Play a Game, winner of the 2017 Yale Series of Younger Poets. A Kundiman fellow, his poems have appeared in Slate, The Cortland Review, and elsewhere. He received an MFA in poetry from Boston University and has taught at BU, Lesley University and the Boston Conservatory. Duy is the director of the Favorite Poem Project, which celebrates the role of poetry in the lives of Americans. ---------
Expecting
Every time the cat went missing, it went
missing for days. Nights, you
left the windows open. Some of the screens were
missing. House full of insects—I had to pull
junebugs from the couch cushions,
the bedsheets, your shirt once. Sometimes
they left their little legs behind. Hard
little fishbone hooks at the back of my throat
when I was a boy. A priest brought communion
to my house. My tongue was the altar. The wafer
dissolved over it, and the sharp bone melted a little.
He wore a green scarf—two men were pulling gold
straight from a river, a halo like the sun, some eyes
like luck—and asked me which saints I prayed to.
From the porch light, I saw your stomach
rise and fall. The curl of your upper lip
made you look resentful. The browning purple
your mouth took on in that light. We did laps
around the pond. Both of us spoke in loud voices.