“Weight” by Franny Choi
What is (inside each question lies another question–a question of weight. What brings you to the bed of this river? What is it about this planet that keeps you running back? Each mouth, for example, lets loose a river of black paint which leads most, if not all the way down to the feet, or what might otherwise be referred to as the stem, if we wouldn’t insist on staying untethered to the molecular dirt that keeps wishing us home. In other words, the question here is one of history, of a family tree that finally stretches its arms beyond the kind of life that breathes oxygen into its gills, or reads most of the way through a listicle, or lies in bed dreading the day, or falls down, down into the earth’s oldest memory until it reaches its first quiet, the lullaby it hums when thinking of something else, the slow breath, the thought that almost becomes a thought just before dawn) your country of origin?
“Weight” will appear in Indiana Review 38.1, Summer 2016: GHOST issue.
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Franny Choi is the author of Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014). She has 
received awards from the Poetry Foundation and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. Her work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, The Journal, Rattle, and others. She is a VONA alumna, a Project VOICE teaching artist, and a member of the Dark Noise Collective.
Impulses, was recently published from Copper Canyon Press. She is the author of the chapbook Slow Dance with Trip Wire, selected by Cornelius Eady for the Poetry Society of America’s 2010 New York Chapbook Fellowship, and a recipient of a 2010 “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize. Her poetry has appeared in Atlas Review, American Poet, The Baffler, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Octopus Magazine, Paper Darts, Phantom Books, A Public Space, Tin House, and elsewhere. She is Assistant Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Manhattanville College and lives in New York City.
The winner of the 2015 Split This Rock Poetry Prize, Sara has received grants from 4Culture, a Ken Warfel Fellowship for Poetry in Community, and a Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Fellowship. Recent work appears in Muzzle, Shift, The New, and the anthology Courage: Daring Poems for Gutsy Girls. Her manuscript was a finalist for the 2015 Pamet River Prize from Yes Yes Books. Sara lives and writes in Charlottesville, VA, where she is a Hoyns Fellow and MFA candidate in Poetry at the University of Virginia.
