Stepping Over
A Poem by Dean Anthony Brink
—— For Nikki Giovanni
Though back then we needed to hold hands and shout out
to let sun shine in beyond what some said one could say
and say it to feel good about raising eyebrows
and how we got in anyways.
I remember seeing you reading your poems
and seeing us in the crowd and smiling
holding hands to feel good about the raised brows—
there’s something different, not so small a college
down the street in a district perched above a ravine.
Your smile with words picked to step
stone by stone rising from shallows
you showed us how to walk
as if walking through the vertigo
of lost Americans in breathy voices
no longer able to name it
wandering the long puddles so long
and the prismatic touch of
lost causes, all hands
no longer to hearts as if asides
to our land: a land of smiles, holding hands
and shouting out
to let the sun shine
keeping no one out on the water.
Dean Anthony Brink’s poetry chronicles changing cultural horizons and an impulse to overcome categories—of love, nationality, how we see and are seen. He is a poet, a painter, and a professor of literature and Japanese thought. From Tacoma, Washington, raised by an immigrant mother, he is now an immigrant father himself in Taiwan, enjoying dual nationality. Reflecting the complications of living across cultures in the shadow of geopolitics, his poetry and artwork seek to explore paths to peace by way of social and ecological justice, and the building of greater empathy in the world through a sort of traveling humor. Poems have appeared in Cordite Poetry Review, Ecozon@, Going Down Swinging, New Writing (UK), Nimrod, and many other venues. No Time and Other Poems, plus The Threepenny Space Opera and A Migrant Homecoming is his first collection (Goldfish Press, 2024). He also publishes speculative fiction set in Taiwan and the Pacific Northwest, and is author of several research monographs, including Poetics and Justice in America, Japan, and Taiwan: Configuring Change and Entitlement (Lexington Books, 2021) and Philosophy of Science and the Kyoto School: An Introduction to Nishida Kitarō, Tanabe Hajime and Tosaka Jun (Bloomsbury, 2021).
