Genny Lim: California Poets Part 10, Two Poems

Genny Lim

April 2nd, 2026

California Poets: Part X

Genny Lim

Two Poems

Deja-vu

The poet is a fly on the wall

You don’t see or hear

The poet’s the loner

Navigating darkness

In search of memories

And dreams unspent

Under moonlit’s shadow past

Formless and intangible

In the wake of revolt

History is sheer terror

Exposing reality and

What may strike

When caught off guard

Beyond hallucination

Citizens collect stamps, baseball cards

Trophies of deer or bears

Or money, the god of all sins

Or guns when men play god

To kill, to loot

One-on-one or enmasse

In blood for oil or occupation

Evil sleeps with a finger on the trigger

Ready to follow the

Ol’ playbook of coups

The subterfuge

The massacre

The Black- ops

With such technical precision

No one could see coming

But the fly on the wall

Nobody is On Time

Nobody ever arrives on time

Because waiting is like watching

a snake moat in the night

Nothing ever arrives because

Waiting is like sitting inside

A freight locker packed like cattle

In search of the El Dorado

Coyotes sell in exchange for gold

Nobody ever arrives because

Time is a cycle of diminishing returns

Packed in a suitcase of dreams

where a desperate breath gasps for air

through a keyhole of light

Death stares, watching

waiting to hand you your papers

When will we arrive? you wonder

as you squeeze a drop of saliva from

your parched throat and churning stomach

If I were you, I would give myself up

Your lonely coffin awaits you

In a world distracted by the 

price of coffee and war

The murmur of freedom

Whispers in your heart

In the river of blood coursing

the Rio Grande to your homeland

In that place where butterflies

make their odyssey north and

where children play on

eternal meadows of Forget-me-nots

You have forgotten to laugh in the way

that only children can laugh

North and south are indistinguishable

to light and shadow

You, in flesh or absence are as

interchangeable as one day and the next

First and last, you will be free because

Nobody ever arrives on time

When heaven calls

Interview

June 11th, 2026

California Poets Interview Series:

Genny Lim, Poet, Playwright, Performer

interviewed by David Garyan

DG: You were appointed the ninth poet laureate of San Francisco and the first Chinese-American in the role. Which initiatives have you undertaken to enrich the city’s literary landscape and what are things you plan to do?

GL: As the ninth poet laureate of SF and the first Chinese American in this role, born and raised in this city to immigrant parents, I’m committed to using the power of the word to help build community. One of the first things on my to-do list was to establish the city’s first youth poet laureate program. With the collaboration of the San Francisco Public Library, Youth Speaks and 826 Valencia, we succeeded in inaugurating the city’s first Youth Poet Laureate program with Youth Poet Laureate, Karan Gupta and Vice Youth Poet Laureate, Aisha McCullough, along with a dynamic cohort of 16 youth poets.

In my outreach to diverse communities, I curate The Living Poets Society Reading Series throughout the city’s branch libraries, introducing youth poets with local established poets in open mic readings. Starting this fall, I will be incorporating interdisciplinary arts and artists into an expanded series that will explore how the language of different art forms inform and influence each other.

DG: San Francisco isn’t just a place you call home—it’s also where you were born. The connection you have to the city is deep. How has it changed over time? What do you love most about writing there and what are the challenges?

GL: The city’s undergone many severe crises from earthquakes, a dot-com bust, a fentanyl epidemic and homelessness to a devastating pandemic that we’ve still not recovered from. Nonetheless, our city is a phoenix that always rises from its ashes. I’m a die-hard San Franciscan to the bone.  The city’s always been at the forefront of many social movements, from the free speech and ethnic studies protests at SFSU, where I was a student, as well as the hippy countercultural movement. Poetry has acted as witness and catalyst throughout, because revolution is our inherited DNA.  I’m a product of the city’s metamorphosis. A poet of witness and change.

DG: Which of San Francisco’s former poet laureates have you worked with to plan readings or organize events in the city?

GL: I’ve worked with former SF Poet Laureates, Jack Hirschman, devorah major, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Alejandro Murguia and Kim Shuck and the former Poet Laureate of Berkeley, Rafael Gonzalez over the years to present and promote readings and more recently, with Alejandro Murguia, Kathleen Hermann, Poet Laureate of Vallejo and Maxine Hong Kingston, along with Veterans for Peace, on a poetry action in downtown San Francisco, spearheaded by David Solnit to stop U.S. arms to Israel to end the occupation and genocide in Palestine.

DG: In 1980, you put together a fascinating project called Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940 in collaboration with Him Mark Lai and Judy Yung. A second edition was released in 2014 with annotated poems, photographs, and interviews with people who were subject to detention on Angel Island. What are some of the most important facts and details you’d like people to know when it comes to this tragedy?

GL: Island was published in 1980 and subsequent printings followed with expanded oral histories and poems. It has taken fifty years for this chapter in our country’s dark immigration history to finally ignite the attention of the general public. History is not a museum artifact. It lives on in serial versions until we have the moral courage to disrupt its direction and change course. Even though the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was repealed in 1943, it did not address its root problem—systemic racism. Yesterday it was the Chinese Exclusion Act. Today it’s the Immigration and Nationality Act and the Alien Enemies Act that legalizes the removal of undocumented immigrants in mass deportations.

DG: In addition to highlighting the injustices of detention with the aforementioned anthology, your hugely successful play, Paper Angels, also premiered around the same time in 1980. How much awareness did the general public have surrounding the events which had occurred sixty-five years ago and how did audiences react when they saw the production?

GL: There is a whole new generation of Asian Americans and Americans in general who have never seen Paper Angels. We recently screened a degraded copy of the 1985 American Playhouse Production version of the play at Presidio Theater to a packed house. The majority of the audience had never seen the play and were struck by the astonishing parallels between the Chinese imprisoned on Angel Island and the detention of immigrants in warehouses today. And who would’ve thought birthright citizenship would even be on the table?  But here we are. We’ve witnessed unimaginable geopolitical shifts in our lifetime.

DG: In multiple interviews you have discussed the musical qualities of language, but even more how “you hear your own poetry as music.” In addition to the collaborations you’ve done with jazz musicians, how does music influence you more generally?

GL: Music has been the balm and soundtrack of my life. Poetry is music and music is poetry. The language of metaphor, rhythm, color, cadence, alliteration, silence, texture, melody, resonance and depth, creates endless possibilities. And beauty. Beauty is light. That’s why in times of darkness, music, poetry and art give us inspiration and hope to bring about social change.

DG: Seven years ago you had the chance to perform your work in Naples, Italy. Could you talk a bit more about this experience?

GL: I really love collaborating with the Italian musicians, like the consummate musician-composer, Gaspare di Lieto, on his CD, A Journey into Poetry. I am planning to return in the fall to record with him again on my upcoming collection of poems, Music Without Walls, in dedication to jazz legends of the past. Two years ago, I toured northern Italy in Lombardy and Lake Garda. I read at the National Museum of Prehistory in the Camonica Valley, a UNESCO historic site, where petroglyphs from the Paleolithic era surrounded the hills. It was an astonishing site.  I was transported to another time.

DG: What do you love most about your visits to Italy?

GL: I love communicating with the locals wherever I travel. Italians have such a spirit and passion for poetry! With their limited English and my lack of Italian, somehow, we manage to communicate, because poets find ways to express themselves through the language of the heart.

DG: You have talked about being raised by your mom who spoke Chinese in the house and didn’t read or write any English. What aspects of the Chinese language fascinate you the most? Given that it’s a tonal language, do you see a connection between your affinity for music and processing language in a mostly auditory way early in life?

GL: My parents’ dialect, Toisanese, (pronounced, Hoisan), is a tonal language, like many African languages. That’s why the Southern rural blues always sounded to me like the Hoisan Wooden Fish Songs I grew up hearing from my mom and other immigrant villagers of the Southern Pearl River Delta of China. They brought these songs with them to Gold Mountain, Gim San, singing of their trials and their homesickness and loneliness away from home—similar to African American narratives in the Deep South. Blues are the roots of jazz.  I’ve worked mostly with jazz musicians, but recently, I’ve been collaborating with Del Sol Quartet and loving the subtle textures, nuances and dynamics that classical strings bring to my poems. I’ve also collaborated with Classical Chinese musicians on the butterfly harp and guzheng. Each instrument yields its own unique sonic expression, much of which is culturally determined, and that allows me the freedom to learn and grow as a poet of the diaspora.

DG: What are you reading or working on these days?

GL: My upcoming book of poems, Music Without Walls, a tribute to past jazz legends, is forthcoming  with City Lights publisher next April in celebration of National Poetry Month. It will also be published in Italian, where I plan to tour and record with jazz musicians there in the fall. In addition, I’ll open the Youth Speaks Brave New Voices event with pianist Unpil Baek, at Herbst Theater on July 18th.

Author Bio:

Genny Lim is a second-generation Chinese American born and raised in San Francisco. On September 6th, 2024, Lim was appointed San Francisco's ninth Poet Laureate by Mayor London Breed and is the first Chinese American poet to serve in this role. She is the author of five poetry collections, Winter Place, Child of War, Paper Gods, La Morte Del Tempo, and KRA! Her award-winning play, Paper Angels, set at the Angel Island immigration barracks, was the first Asian American play to air on PBS's American Playhouse in 1985 and was produced throughout the US, Canada, and China. Lim has collaborated with jazz legends Max Roach, Herbie Lewis, and Bay Area musicians Marcus Shelby, John Santos, Francis Wong, Jon Jang, Anthony Brown and the Asian American Orchestra and Del Sol String Quartet. She has also collaborated with Gen Taiko, Lenora Lee Dance on librettos for Within These Walls and Dreams of Flight at the Chinese Immigration Detention Station on Angel Island.