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Paul Tran is poetry editor at The Offing and Chancellor’s Graduate Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis. Their work appears in The New Yorker, POETRY, and elsewhere. They are the first Asian American since 1993 and first transgender poet to win the Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam.
There are many ways to die, you remind me,
pointing towards your scorched heart, lance-
pierced and thorn-leashed, as I think I’m dying,
sensation abandoning then shocking my body,
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