Poem of the Week | January 12, 2026

Christian Yeo Xuan is the author of the forthcoming So Rain, winner of the 2025 Sundress Chapbook Competition. His work has been published or is forthcoming in EPOCH, ANMLY, The Madison Review, Indiana Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Oxford Poetry, The Hajar Book of Rage, and New Singapore Poetries, among others. He has placed or been a finalist for the Washington Square Review New Voices Award, the Poetry London Pamphlet Prize, the National Poetry Competition, and the Bridport Prize. He is a Fall ’25 Brooklyn Poets Fellow and has received support from the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop, Tin House, Fine Arts Work Centre in Provincetown, and the National Arts Council of Singapore. He holds a BA in law from Cambridge.

“Poem in Which the Father Is the Metaphor” by Christian Yeo Xuan is our Poem of the Week.

Poem in Which the Father Is the Metaphor

The room has forgotten my name
Bird remembers my name
Call me by my name

The gay movie? bird asks
Can movies be gay? I ask bird

Late-blooming cinephile, early-blooming
plaid-wearer, bird, panic-stricken,
rechristens me Charlie

I resist like a wet towel

Alright then, Xuan

Bird and I standing by a beach
I’m standing, bird is perching
Unknown infant has infant softness
Surprise: bird is the infant
Surprise: I’m the one perching

Go to confession alone
Damn it, it’s still bird
Bird, priest and confessor
Bird, infant, infant holder

Call bird solitude. Call bird desertion.

Call me blank object

In this changed form, bird is still whiny
Bird wants to be a wantaway ox

Bird flinches when I call him orange sky of evening
Bird asks me for Afrobeats recommendations
Bird is high on possible emotional connection
Bird and I rise upon the stroke, strobe, smoke
Bird promises, I will die away soon
Bird warns, anytime now
Bird says, maybe I’m depressed
Bird, I am so lonely

I give up my name for bird
I let him rechristen me over and over
Bird is helplessness, bird is pity
Bird is thought, bird is weakness
Bird, I want the weakness of human love
Bird doesn’t believe in weakness

Author’s Note

I wrote this poem on a flight from Paris to New York in response to a prompt asking for erasures or redactions of a section of Wordsworth’s The Prelude. It was the summer of 2024, I was due to spend the night in my friend Lae’s apartment before heading to Ohio, and I was obsessed with making this poem work in my cramped little seat. No word or line from The Prelude remains in this poem, but the strangeness and capaciousness of Wordsworth’s diction allowed me to access a certain language school that had been locked off from me for a while. This poem is the first of the poems where I began to excavate lineage, inheritance, and debt in the context of a contemporary globalized order, and also the beginning of my tinkering with musicality, scoring, and repetition.