Poem of the Week | March 31, 2025

“To the Chimeras of South Jersey” by Jia-Rui Cook is our Poem of the Week.

Jia-Rui Cook is a Chinese American writer, editor, and producer who grew up in South Jersey and now lives in Los Angeles. Her poetry has recently appeared in Air/Light, Alta Journal, Hunger Mountain Review, Only Poems, and Puerto del Sol. Jia-Rui won the Zócalo Public Square Poetry Prize in 2013. Once a staff reporter for the Los Angeles Times and the news events and projects lead at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Jia-Rui is currently a senior communications officer at the California Wellness Foundation. She is working on her first book of poems.
 

To the Chimeras of South Jersey

The roof of your mouth, burnt over and over
by Taiwanese beef noodle soup and slick
slices of pizza        will heal. The skip-hop

onto the floor for Bizarre Love Triangle
and the ache-striped wait as everyone else
slow dances to Boyz II Men        will become

muscle memory. The afternoons you fill with
Soul Train reruns and Jane Austen dramas
will tell you when        an ending is

approaching. You may hate bitter melon now
but you will learn to swallow it. Cheering
when the dork wins over Jake Ryan

in Sixteen Candles but grimacing through
Long Duk Dong’s fake accent        acing
honors English but flunking Saturday

Chinese School: double cherries that ripen
when summer sun runs hot.        This world
will feel less than whole for many years:

you won’t make out more than six characters
in the newspapers your parents are reading; you
won’t be able to explain to your grandparents

what you do with your friends all day. Windbreakers
never the right shade of fluorescent pink; hair
never teased high enough.        From here

I can tell you your world is overfull—a night nursery
for creatures grafting together. Awkwardness
is the only proven way to fledge a chimera.

You will need time to feel the fullness of your limbs,
the heft in your pixiu lion chest, the dragon snap
in your teeth, the space blown clear
under your feathered wings.

Author’s Note

Lucille Clifton’s poem “i am not done yet,” which ends with the lines, “where I have been / most of my lives is / where I’m going,” got me thinking about what I still carry with me from growing up in New Jersey in the 1980s and ’90s. There was a significant number of us Asian American kids who were born in the US to parents who had been the first in their families to immigrate to this country in the 1960s or were babies when our parents came. I remember feeling a lot of loss—of language, which I knew was a bridge to my family, and of being part of the “mainstream” (whatever that really was). With hindsight, of course, I can see that what felt like loss was really just the filling in of other influences, however problematic and contradictory. We were being pieced together into something that was different but nevertheless whole and alive. The chimera was the metaphor that came to mind. And it felt fitting to me that the Chinese pixiu, which brings good fortune, has the ability to do so many things—run, fly, fight, and eat voraciously.