Alex Fang
Summer 2025 | Poetry
Self-Portrait as a Sentence
Forgetting itself,
the sentence starts again
in a different tongue,
above a drawer of
Schrödinger’s roaches,
trying to remember where
next to go but
thinking it best to first
fill the drawer
with some more
letters, so
off the sentence
goes, plodding
through lectures and
seminars, by dark eaves-
dropping on characters
facing away
from the shot, rubbing itself
against idle chatter
about town, nodding
at jokes it just does not
get, turning
around to repeat them
anyway, dreaming
in the back
of a cab that they
did land, a-
waking the morning
after able to answer
the telephone, able
to pass as a longer sentence
in fact,
regurgitating hypotactic
scraps, replete
with synthetic
opinions, closet full
of Latinate locutions
but nothing to wear,
always scurrying
by mirrors, wondering
if it counts as one
sentence all the
same, identifying as
mirror, yet
often still responding
in earnest to
“how are you”s that
have already
walked
past, no chance to edit,
years later
just slouching along,
stretching long and thin,
moving funny,
swaths of letters
spelling but a simulacrum,
and in the
vertigo it imagines
itself forgetting
again,
starting out where
it first did,
on a woman’s back,
falling
because mom slipped
on a piece of water-
melon rind; it
heard her cry out
in Mandarin.
Alex Fang is a lawyer and poet based in Brooklyn. She is a graduate of Columbia Journalism School and Harvard Law School, and the translator of a new edition of Shen Fu’s Six Records of a Floating Life (Printim Editions, 2025) from classical Chinese.