Andrew Chi Keong Yim
Andrew Chi Keong Yim was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. He was awarded the 2024 New Voices Award in Poetry from the Washington Square Review, selected by Terrance Hayes. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets, 32 Poems, Washington Square Review, Bat City Review, and AAWW's The Margins. He has been a public school teacher in Boston and New York City, and has taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and with the Wisconsin Prison Humanities Project.
Love Song from the Back of a GameStop
Do what you wish
with me,
gobsmacked
and back for more.
Listening to you land
the longest note
in the Final Fantasy VI OST, winged
operatic beauty.
Shyly, show me
your Nintendo fanfiction
Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
but set in the 90’s.
Link and Zelda both wearing
scrunchies, somehow harder now
to tell apart.
Take me
to the nicer mall.
To the Trader Joe’s.
Buy me cacio e pepe.
Take me to Australia
through the golden bush
where we’ll point at orchids and shout:
Birds-of-paradise! Birds-of-paradise!
Flabbergast me,
baby.
I’ll take a train.
I’ll take a plane.
We’ll lift the armrest,
slouch through the sky together.
We’ll stare at the pixelated map on a screen
ticking us surely across the ocean.
You’ll zoom in and say,
Doesn’t it look just
like blue paint
on a popcorn wall?
What a world.
What a beautiful world.