Ira Sukrungruang | Poetry

Ira Sukrungruang is the author of the memoirs Southside Buddhist and Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist Boy, the short story collection The Melting Season, and the poetry collection In Thailand It Is Night. He is the coeditor of two anthologies on the topic of obesity: What Are You Looking At? The First Fat Fiction Anthology and Scoot Over, Skinny: The Fat Nonfiction Anthology. He is the recipient of the 2015 American Book Award, New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Nonfiction Literature, an Arts and Letters Fellowship, and the Emerging Writer Fellowship. His work has appeared in many literary journals, including Post Road, The Sun, and Creative Nonfiction. He is one of the founding editors of Sweet: A Literary Confection, and teaches in the MFA program at University of South Florida.

 

I. The Third Wheel
From Stories of the Unrequited

X loved Y, but Z muddled the whole thing up.

I was there.
Z was a train steaming air
and made it hard to breathe.
X was like (What the fuck?!) but did nothing.
Y tossed her hair.
Y could be a major b-word, I tell you.
She’d squeeze
the salt right out of your eyes.
Z was like (I’m your dream in a dream.)
Y was like (Don’t worry. He’s just a friend.)
X stayed static—been that way from the beginning—
a lone Kansas tree,
in a lone Kansas field.
The rest, as they say, was history.
I was there.