Figure from ground: lost-wax

In memoriam meaning:


        Make a wax body.
        Cover your body in clay.
        Heat.

        Make a clay body.
        Cover in wax.
        More clay.
        Heat.

        The bronze goes in the empty parts.
        The wax drains into a ghost world, formless.

        The clay can do two things: become
        a kind of printer, making copies, or
        crack apart, go into dust.

        It misses the object
        it made possible. The bronze learns

        to live like this, contra
        -pposto, afraid
        only of war

        which could turn it
        into capital, helmets, any

        sign of distributed absence.

—

from All Empires Must–published by Airlie Press.

Buy the book here.

—

Mia Kang (she/her) is the author of All Empires Must
(Airlie Press, 2025), which won the 2023 Airlie Prize,
and the chapbooks Apparent Signs (Ghost City Press, 2024)
and City Poems (ignitionpress, 2020). Her writing has appeared
in Gulf Coast, Poetry Northwest, Pleiades, wildness, and elsewhere.
She is best known (barely known) as the self-appointed Poet
Laureate of the Process.