Danielle Mckinney, Mercy (detail), featured in AGNI 103
Pete
He takes me up to the planetarium to look at stars and planets. The
more we zoom in, the more the planets look like houses burning.
There are reasons for those domes, those halves of things forever
separating and coming back together. Those slats in the roof, they
can be controlled—opened and closed, unlike my mouth with its red
poppy, its dark copy. I wonder who is observing us, these two
terrestrial bodies, celestial sextants aligned only in the night. If they
zoom in, they will see two finger-like test tubes filled with fire.
Victoria Chang
Victoria Chang’s most recent poetry collections are Tree of Knowledge (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, forthcoming 2026) and With My Back to the World (FSG, 2024). The latter was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and won the Forward Prize. An earlier collection, OBIT (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), was longlisted for the National Book Award and was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Griffin International Poetry Prize. Chang has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and the Chowdhury Prize in Literature. She is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and director of Poetry@Tech. You can find her at www.victoriachangpoet.com. (updated 4/2026)