Diana Cao
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dianacao.bsky.social
Diana Cao
@dianacao.bsky.social
220 followers 290 following 9 posts
poet/lawyer. she/they.
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dianacao.bsky.social
new poems in @diodeeditions.bsky.social today, including a new sonnet crown written during residency @justbuffalolit.bsky.social 🤍🌕

diodepoetry.com/cao_diana-2/
The Reason Branches partition the sky each night I set shadows skittering their small bodies in the under brush and above me one brilliant eye regards me no no many eyes regard me else why skitter I’m the reason for their flight from the groomed hedge I never get a moment alone Headlights tremble because they are hiding the humans hurtling by in their machines there is sometimes a baby in the machine capable of nothing except its next meal biting the cheek of the preferred mother but any wire monkey could do Let's be "ourselves" right up to the end I was circling the block pretending we were a tragedy and then we were so something out there must be listening it's embarrassing to be caught pretending but from where I stand Star Market is brighter than both the moon and the sun rising now ushering another sane day well time’s healing Is that yesterday's rain
March 14, 2025 at 4:25 PM
dianacao.bsky.social
new poem—thank you @yalereview.bsky.social
Sometimes you have to be still and suffer, my teacher says about writing, but I have an active suffering that calls me to run after it. Keep up, says the feed of bad news. It's dangerous to see others as an abstraction. I don't need to hate anyone as an abstraction because I have my mother—I hate my mother. She who keeps stealing the car keys is very real. I see her; I know Terror. What does it mean that I know just where to find a sugar baby but not a nice companion for my Terror? What does it say about me that I'd rather be a sugar baby than a nice companion for my mother? I don't actually know if that's true. But when I'm in a car chasing my mother down I-95, wind slicing through the papers in the backseat, I'm not thinking about writing, or about suffering, even if that's what this is.
February 2, 2025 at 8:58 PM
dianacao.bsky.social
👾
the algorithm moves toward an average every day i prove my humanity to robots every day i check my accounts i listen to the children outside my window and am a child again listening to the other children outside the window i felt from that experience then: i am one of the species but not one with every one feels this unraveling every one of us gets closer to
January 24, 2025 at 9:59 PM
dianacao.bsky.social
thanks to @dialogist.bsky.social for my first two poems of the year—both, sort of, about robots

(dialogist.org — also worth reading all their previous weeks' poems)
Refractory Period I listen to a robot pronounce coitus in three accents, to prepare for a class on the history of marriage. Nothing kills the mood faster than terminology. What's on your mind? M asks me after. Sometimes it's tedious to be a social animal. A class on the laws of marriage is a class on the story of disgust, which I learn is sometimes justified and sometimes not. Which is this? I tell M I'm thinking of mnemonic arbitrage. It's not romantic but it's more romantic than saying that sex with M has reminded me of sex: clicking teeth, smooth obstruction, fingers catching— what. Has my body been this strange before? I could guess what we might do to one another. When I want to transform distance into tenderness, I imagine my subject listening for their name in classroom attendance. I can hear them calling present. Which reminds me of the nostalgia in old photographs of legendary despots: still boys and already the world we might have known is gone.
January 24, 2025 at 9:57 PM