Olivia Do
Abecedarian in vivo
Kathy Jiang
For YJ, EO
In the amniotic beginning,
Kathy Jiang is a poet and therapist from the D.C. area. Her work, which has been nominated for Best New Poets and received support from Brooklyn Poets and other organizations, is featured or forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Variant Lit, Oxford Poetry, and elsewhere. She is an editor and facilitator at Seventh Wave, a poetry reader at Adroit, and a featured poet in the 2026 Poets in Pajamas series.
we shared an unseemly
cellular dialect.
Eating through
the furious gray of my heart.
Before it was a heart.
Ingenue inside of June.
You could only keep down
the lightest meals. Napa leaves,
opened into paper.
A plainboiled language, quiet
as a river. Sleep fed me,
evaded you. Your teeth shook
in their sockets. Blackened
tomatoes in salt, heart-up.
No longer did we meet through
a tombed umbilical cord,
circle through the unbroken water,
Umma, where lives ripe under
violence watched. Waiting for us.
Excise the years until I understood
the quiet X we two
would zoom into.
Kathy Jiang is a poet and therapist from the D.C. area. Her work, which has been nominated for Best New Poets and received support from Brooklyn Poets and other organizations, is featured or forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Variant Lit, Oxford Poetry, and elsewhere. She is an editor and facilitator at Seventh Wave, a poetry reader at Adroit, and a featured poet in the 2026 Poets in Pajamas series.
Next Up: Three Poems by Letitia Jiju