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Nancy Lynée Woo 
Nancy Lynée Woo spends her free time hitching a ride to the other side of maybe. She is an MFA candidate at Antioch University, the recipient of fellowships from PEN America, Arts Council for Long Beach, and Idyllwild Writers Week, and the author of two chapbooks. Find her cavorting around Long Beach, California, and online at nancylyneewoo.com.

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Naysaying the Noise

I haven’t found one thing the stars
aren’t a cure for. Hand me my mountain 

bag, full of ripe plums plummeting 
from flower bud to boiling pot to jam jar. 

I count the miles back out to chaparral, 
heaving under the weight of my need 

to see everything, and to be seen seeing it. 
Would I feel less wanderlust if I could 

scrub off the dead glory of a nation 
obsessed with itself? Follow me 

to a hot spring tucked away 
behind some tall grass—

would you like that? I accelerate 
out to the wilderness, forgetting 

what I’m supposed to be forgetting. 
To get absolutely lost in the ridiculous 

brilliance of an acorn—I have everything 
I could ever want. And still I wonder 

how far the human race will go for a profit,
whether we will ever find another home 

like this one, its miraculous blue, its hilarious 
oxygen. Every cat meme is a metaphor

for the existential threat du jour. Somewhere, 
a teenage girl thinks her ears are too big. 

All we have is our experience. Just ask 
the Joshua trees, prophets of beauty, survival.

And the hawking jays, what I wouldn’t even call 
song. I want to give them to you, 

their pointy heads and blue breasts flashing.
Everyone deserves to follow the sky.

What illusion am I breaking when I say no 
to the noise? I won’t entertain hatred, refuse 

to listen to a man on the news spitting 
globs of fear in a language no oriole, 

no quail, no midnight bat, no creosote bush, 
no dire wolf, no waxing moon understands.