Certain Outlines Can Only Be Imagined by Asa Drake
Certain Outlines Can Only Be Imagined
Asa DrakeRain overflowing from the cup
I left outside. Honestly, it’s the wrong year
to write a love poem. Though I walk
through the valley of semblance.
I am every figure in the deck. Magnolias
make me feel guilty. Half I go where
my mother sends me, half I deliver
unintended messages. Chimera
of passion flowers running into Lady Banks
barely keeping pace with the sampaguitas.
How Lady Banks is a placeholder name
for the unknown gardener who tended
this cultivar in China before 1807.
By placeholder, I mean erasure
but I would like to mean placeholder.
I would like—one day—
for the gardener to be revealed.
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SHARED WITH GRATITUDE
This poem appeared in Sierra: The Magazine of the Sierra Club, 2022.
ABOUT ASA DRAKE
Asa Drake is a Filipina/white poet in Central Florida. She is the author of Maybe the Body (Tin House, 2026) and Beauty Talk (Noemi Press 2026), winner of the 2024 Noemi Press Book Award. Her chapbook One Way to Listen was selected by Taneum Bambrick as the winner of Gold Line Press’s 2021 Poetry Chapbook Competition. A National Poetry Series finalist, she is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, the Florida Book Awards, Sundress Publications,… (more)
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