Inference

You offer me an English-language
Qur’an. Thanks

for the toad skin gold
kiwi. Pauses 

for the grandfathered milkweed.
Things I don’t know include 

how to distinguish 
between the missing

vowels of the abjad.
The sugar, red

and silver maples’
indents. How to wire

the two lamps after 
you leave me.

---

Stella Wong (@stellayinwong) is the author of STEM (Princeton University Press) and SPOOKS (winner of the Saturnalia Books Editors Prize). A graduate of Harvard, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Columbia, Wong’s poems have appeared in POETRY, American Poetry Review, and The New Republic. She is an Electrical and Computer Engineering PhD student.