Lisa Low

Hearth & Hand with Magnolia drops the month
of my weird wisdom tooth extraction,

all the way from Waco. While my cheeks deflate,
I write an angry Google review

for the dental practice in my head. I need
face wash, mopping liquid, and bananas,

to get a haircut, to speak up more
in class, etc. I get a cart, my tongue
still searches the empty sockets. Joanna’s

cardboard cutout greets me—the rush of seeing
someone else Asian in Indiana but without

the threat of competition—like the feeling
of learning years later that Joshua Harris
is half-Asian. No wonder he’s so attractive,

I laughed to myself, wanting to guarantee
my future children will also be beautiful. Silently,

I tell Joanna how much I admire her empire,
how I also find her husband charming

yet annoying. Under a red-and-white bull’s-eye,
I could be anywhere in America. Like
freshman year of college in Houston, away

from home for the first time, I missed
everything I knew and went to Target.
 

I am not yet tired of my younger self—how popular she is in my poems, the nostalgia she make people feel—so I milk her for inspiration. One of these days, she tells me:

A dollhouse opens
& opens until someone
throws the whole thing out.

Enter a dollhouse
with your face inside the house,
above the house.

What are you trying to
look like, & who are you watching
without getting caught?

It is dangerous
to move furniture back &
forth so easily.

Lisa Low is the author of the chapbook Crown for the Girl Inside (YesYes Books, 2023), winner of the 2020 Vinyl 45 Chapbook Contest. Her work has appeared in Copper Nickel, Ecotone, Massachusetts Review, Poetry, Southern Review, and elsewhere, and was awarded a 2023 Pushcart Prize and the 2020 Gulf Coast Nonfiction Prize. Originally from Maryland, she lives in Chicago.