by the pond
By Thomas Guo
“by the pond” by Thomas Guo is the first runner-up of the 2025 Palette Poetry Prize, selected by Palette editors. We’re honored to share this ruminative poem with you.
the steel belly waits, cold and pregnant
with asparagus, half-swallowed by weeds thick as bayonets.
they clutch at it like your own children, whose
knuckles shined of fifty year old creases. by those clementine rinds, softening
into splinter-toed redwood roots where
you first unknotted your lungs to me. now, all we have
are these imaginary monsoons ripping through the west, the air
beaten into nickels, oil-scummed as silver, rust-
lipped as the song you always hummed, sagging
under the weight of your family’s medals. by the benches
we sat on, underneath those square-ish leaves, testing the rims
of soda cans that taught us sweetness.
you wore that makeshift crown of stolen bottle caps with pride
all of them now marked with Coca-co–. would you
believe i still remember the afternoon we lost
your socks to the pond’s slug-colored shores?
they floated into flags for a bygone nation
of our mason jar cicadas, chewed up straws, and microphone branches.
our names pierced through the pond’s surface tension
now fortified by the backs of algae.
as the cicadas burn out their throats, we take
refuge under the moon-waxed hinges of the hut
we are constructing–
the moon spooning a new song, one of our own, into our mouths.