Leveler Poetry Journal
About Leveler Submission Guidelines More Poems




Yu-Han Chao

levelheaded: Push Kick

 

Yu-Han Chao’s “Push Kick” is a “taekwondo triptych” presumably arrived at by watching YouTube videos of cute cats, eating churros and drinking whiskey, and finally writing illustrated cat poems that inspired the poem at hand. By presenting a low brow path to poetry, Chao welcomes us into the work. Her insistence on the everyday is marked by references to pop culture delivered in common language with a light-hearted tone (“Pull-ups, man–they don’t work).

 

However, beneath the poem’s humor exists a subtle desperation. While having to stand before a crowd drenched in toddler pee is hilarious, it would also really suck. The fact that the profits from selling one’s poetry books might, just might, cover dinner and drinks is also a bummer.

 

Perhaps Chao relies on humor within this poem as a defense mechanism–as a “Push Kick” of sorts–to create distance between herself and what might hurt her. The poem’s third column reveals that someone in her life was deserving of a “sharp push-kick to his crotch,” and he may well be the “ghost” that the speaker sinks into when attempting to distance herself earlier in the work.

 

Of course, the speaker never directly states that the facts about push kicks refer to her. This method also draws us in as readers, demanding that we make connections between the poem’s three panels ourselves rather than having it spelt out for us. So, in the end, when we arrive at the speaker’s desire for “sooner rather than later” to end up at a “sum total of reduced fear, lesser cumulative suffering,” we have done the math. We’ve added up the kitties and the booze, the martial arts and the now absent other to understand why she feels this need.

 

 

– The Editors