West Trade Review Spring Preview: "Outside The Gym is Another Gym [A Counterpublic In Public]" by Joshua Nguyen

Joshua Nguyen

Joshua Nguyen is the author of Come Clean (University of Wisconsin Press, 2021), winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, the Writers' League of Texas Discovery Award, and the Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters Poetry Award. He is also the author of the chapbooks, American Lục Bát for My Mother (Bull City Press, 2021) and Hidden Labor & The Naked Body (Sundress Publications, 2023). He is a Vietnamese-American writer, a collegiate national poetry slam champion (CUPSI), and a native Houstonian. He has received fellowships from Kundiman, Tin House, Sundress Academy For The Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. He has been published in Wildness, The Texas Review, Auburn Avenue, and elsewhere. He is a humor editor for The Offing Mag, the Kundiman South co-chair, a bubble tea connoisseur, and loves a good pun. He received his MFA/PhD from The University of Mississippi. He currently teaches at Tufts University.

Outside The Gym is Another Gym [A Counterpublic In Public]

After A.R. Ammons

You walk over the dunes, again, this morning

to the adult playground

of rust-green beams, bars, & bodies which rest

right along the shore

with a seagull, with a fish thrashing

inside its orange, thick skin:

the sunrise, the better, the sweat-lattice,

the heavy backs breaking beneath

each grunt among the outdoor gym:

spandex— purple & pinker cheeks,

proliferating sand on broad shoulders:

broad like the Ibis beak

sideways, stalking

carcass from the pigeon, stealing

glances

with the half-naked bodybuilder named Jay:

blue-head bird, blue veins, blue

river trails bursting out the neck,

Southeast-dirt Asian eyes, afraid

to look afraid;

creatine sprinkled across the pull-up bar,

sandpipers snorting,

pecking at the fingertips, broad

chest touching

the bar, nipples

making contact— thick

shirt dangling over the pole:

a flag waves,

yellow, by the lifeguard,

dreaming of Baywatch-running

with seagulls on the shore;

algae holding down toes,

hamstring resisting sciatica, peripheral

views of whales humming

to avoid

agony over

a fallen brethren

to oil, crashing

upon the wake:

waves crash, gray

thunder becomes cirrus,

a nonbinary wren

finishes their 44th diamond

push-up, falls

on the 45th, faces impending doom

from the same sky giving oxygen;

an olympian egret lifts her body from her

wheelchair to the balance rings,

her triceps— a horseshoe, balancing

in the air like a rubied hummingbird, moving

to stay

alive, survive, take up history:

the flower is just a flower,

the beauty is just beauty,

you move how you need,

your arms match the arms

of objects who object

against you;

your arms

must pick up your cause

before, by,

& at

the end of the world.

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