David Lau

Issue One

Emerging World Cities 

Still in the struggle

new ancients

I met his feet

were angles

top predator

in the system animals

we drove in the mountain

ice that is melting

The not-words go the other way

X lived here 

Thomas-Sankara derived

anthem for the displaced

leader of a last foco

hold out in the hills of Guerrero

forever kill

the head python

coding stars and dreams

succulent forest blister

bats fevers and spiders

trashed people


Found Poem

The campaign has absorbed so much

attention, risking disorientation,

movementist mirage over real events

in order to bolster the faith

of an often-distant audience.

Such sermons, broadcast over

social media, soon rise to such

a volume that all else is drowned out,

obscuring the basic facts of what

happened and what it really might portend.

About David Lau
Poet David Lau grew up in Long Beach, California. He has described his family as a “Chicano-Chinese and Anglo household.” He earned degrees from UCLA and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The poems in his first book, Virgil and the Mountain Cat (2009), were described by the Believer’s Dominic Luxford as “simultaneously creative and destructive … grounded in—or rather, trapped by—the present. …”