Dorothy Chan’s Editor’s Note: A Triple Sonnet for Valentine’s Day
Dorothy Chan’s Editor’s Note: A Triple Sonnet for Valentine’s Day
Table for ten at dim sum is my V-Day dream,
like when lovers & lobsters & lollipops are
on the menu—Suck a little harder, and I’ll race
you to the center of the Tootsie Pop. Cherry.
Good. Hard. Classic. Center, like the volta
of a poem blasted to the nth degree, or how
we get the pop in poetry, become the moment—
I want to crescendo into your dreams, Honey,
play you a little song—a sonnet—triple it,
like when Milo from The Phantom Tollbooth
conducts an orchestra that becomes sunrise
and sunset, and you stop in the gallery, move
a little closer to the strokes, feeling the white space
in between. At night, I dream of touch and the sound
you make as you yearn—it’s not about needing
something, it’s about wanting everything, like sugar
and spice and sundaes sprinkled with gummy snakes
and the whole damn dream sequence delivered to
your doorstep, right next to the bouquet of O’Keeffe
and the Godiva Gold Collection. I dream about rivers,
abundant. Or what about the simulation game when
your male lead says his apartment number is “214,
like Valentine’s Day,” and he thinks it’s poetry.
But it’s not. No one dictates “romance” to you.
Rita and I used to devour sushi boats and sake
cocktails, in our twenties, on this day, two Asian
femmes—this holiday of love. And there’s nothing,
nothing we love more than the Hive, so this one’s
for you, Honeys. Christina believes each issue
should be celebrated with an Aperitivo and brunch,
and isn’t she such a dream, and don’t we eat with
our eyes, first. And who would ever say no to endless
pleasure—bottomless pineapple mimosas, pastries
galore: chocolate ganache cake with raspberries on
top, coconut cake snowballing its way through,
matcha cake with red bean filling serving orgasm,
and every type of benedict and crepe in sight, and
pour some more bubbly, Honey, and it’s straight
out of a movie set or TV show about excess from
the early 2000s, only we’re not leaving until we eat.
Cheers to Lucky Number 3, Hive, and thank you for
all this love and light—every single yearning quenched.
About Dorothy Chan
Dorothy Chan (she/they) is the author of most recently, BABE (Diode Editions 2021), in addition to Revenge of the Asian Woman (Diode Editions, 2019), Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold (Spork Press, 2018), and the chapbook Chinatown Sonnets (New Delta Review, 2017). They were a 2020 and 2014 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship finalist, a 2020 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Poetry for Revenge of the Asian Woman, and a 2019 recipient of the Philip Freund Prize in Creative Writing from Cornell University. Their work has appeared in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere. Chan is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, Editor Emeritus of Hobart, Book Reviews Co-Editor of Pleiades, and Co-Founder and Editor in Chief of Honey Literary Inc., a 501(c)(3) literary arts organization. They were the 2021 Resident Artist for Toward One Wisconsin. Visit their website at dorothypoetry.com.