September–October 2013 • 43 photo : kaloian Genesis Achy Obejas The first time I saw your father, I stared back into the pool at your reflection while he waded through, the water moving in gentle circles away from us. The first time, I thought it was the Nile we’d dipped our heads into, the water thick with primordial cells, parthenogenesis producing near identical beings: his skin, your chin, the way your lips pull back to reveal teeth, the slope of his nose. I thought the water was playing tricks with the light, obscuring the line at the horizon, a ribbon of black and white DNA shimmering like schools of fish. I thought perhaps I’d confused which side of the reflection you – or he – was on, my heart sealed up in a tank instead, with two inches of water and a ton of salt, hallucinating in an imaginary womb, looking for you – I’m sure of that: I was looking for you – his co-joined daughter, my hermaphroditic lover. I dreamt I made love to your father, straddling his hips, taking the soft flesh of his waist in my hands and kneading it between my fingers until it came loose. I make love to you, our bodies red as newborns, loud and fierce, two amphibian women choosing to breathe, splashing the water as madly as an ancient god might have at our emergence. Achy Obejas is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Ruins, Days of Awe, and three other books of fiction. Her poetry chapbook, This Is What Happened in Our Other Life, was both a critical favorite and a best-seller. Also a translator, her Spanish translation of Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was a finalist for Spain’s Esther Benítez Translation Prize. Born in Havana, she currently lives in Chicago with her wife, Megan Bayles, their son, Ilan, and too many cats. During an email exchange, Nicholas YB Wong told me that he feels “linguistically inferior ” because he is a Chinese poet who lives in China but publishes in English in the United States. Wong’s anxiety about writing in a foreign tongue is misplaced. His poetry displays a linguistic command that few poets achieve. When I asked what poets he admired, I was pleasantly surprised to hear that he read gay poet D. A. Powell—surprised because other than sharing a neoformalist and elliptical aesthetic, Wong’s unerotic verse has little in common with Powell’s homoerotic poetics. In “corydon & alexis,” Powell invokes at once Virgil’s second eclogue and Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain”: shepherdboy? not the most salient image for contemporary readers nor most available. unless you’re thinking brokeback mountain: a reference already escaping. I did love a montana man, though no good shepherd. According to Wong, “Inside America” (page 47) evokes “America as an interior space housing the narrator who is trapped between the impulse to leave and the obsessive, fetishistic attention to details of the ‘house.’” Instead of an erotic poetics, however, Wong constructs poetics of place and belonging. The poem’s primary moment occurs when Wong exhorts the reader, “Call me faggot,” an echo of Melville’s “Call me Ishmael,” in which faggot, like Ishmael, serves as a metonym for the Other. This imperative not only marks a shift from first to second person, establishing the reader as interlocutor, it also functions as an act of selfnaming , a positive declaration of queer identity. I began this essay by saying that I never wanted to be called queer. Today I welcome it. Like the writers featured in this issue, my queerness informs who I am and how I see the world. It’s been a long journey from reading The Front Runner in 1977 in Sapulpa, Oklahoma, to writing about queer lit for World Literature Today. Just as I have found my place here, the writers featured in this issue have taken their place alongside a long list of notable world authors. Dallas, Texas cover feature ...