Vivian Kao | Daughters of the Republic

Daughters of the Republic: poems by Vivian Kao. Number 1 in Volume Fourteen of our limited-edition Summer Kitchen Series.

Publication:  July 26, 2026
Limited edition – only 49 copies
28 pages
$ 12.00

Vivian Kao lives in Flint, Michigan, and teaches English at Mott Community College. She is the author of a book of poems, Dear Mrs. River-Dragon (Another New Calligraphy, 2024), which was a finalist for the Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize. She was the 2024-25 Writer-in-Residence at the Buckham Fine Arts Project. Her poems have appeared or will soon appear in East Village Magazine, Apricity, The Louisville Review, Press Pause, and the anthology Born for Such a Time as This (Buckham Arts Collective, 2025).

F5

My grandmother’s ashes are buried in a park under
a smooth heap of rocks and a blue marker that says F5.
My grandmother, once 101, is now F5.

My mother places fruit and flowers
on the heap like all the other descendants of all the other
blue markers sleeping inside their jars in rainy April.

When I was a grandchild, the future F5 told me
if you point at the Moon with your finger
the Moon Lady will come down and slice

your ear off while you sleep.
For years, when I wanted to alert others
to the Moon’s beauty, its brightness or roundness

or difference in appearance from the night before,
I would gesture at it with my chin
or an elbow, or jerk my head in its direction.

In the last decade of her life
my grandmother was afraid of the sky too,
of planes shot down by Chinese missiles.

She wanted to pack an emergency bag
with a few changes of clothes, her prayer beads,
a palm-sized portrait of Amitabha.

My mother wanted to know
Where would we go Ma,
this is an island.

Tell me
where is there
to go.