Jenna Le

Apotheosis

When I was five or six,

I wore one of those white

ribbed undershirts to bed,

and since my weight and height

were tiny for my age,

it reached down to mid-thigh,

and I used to pretend

this tank top was a high-

style mermaid gown, so when

I wormed beneath the covers,

sleep’s tide would bear me to

a vine-decked hall where lovers

dance waltzes until dawn,

and in my swanny dress

I, crowned belle of the ball,

all night would opalesce.

Jenna Le (jennalewriting.com) is the author of three full-length poetry collections, Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011), A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2017), an Elgin Awards Second Place winner, voted on by the international membership of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association, and Manatee Lagoon (Acre Books, 2022). She was selected by Marilyn Nelson as winner of Poetry By The Sea’s inaugural sonnet competition. Her poems appear in AGNI, Verse Daily, West Branch, and elsewhere. A daughter of Vietnamese refugees, she has a B.A. in math and an M.D. and works as a physician and educator in New York City.