Tuesday, January 13, 2015

Pui Ying Wong


MOAN MELODY

                                    But I spin all these crazy yarns
   as if sleeping in a mound of narrative”
                                                    --Zbigniew Herbert--

Maze of market streets,
bric-a-brac, flowers, shoes,
browsers’ faces, gazes

that peel night to day,
little cars going around
in search of
ascend, descend, yield---

to who, to whom
these red lights blink and blink,
crosswalks, guardrails,
scurf pegged air, there’s heart
in what you keep opening to,

a man leans on the horn
as if he’s waited
his whole life, enough,
how else can we get through
and get to, please,

the station master speaks,
just another foreign tongue
but the gesture is clear,
no tickets, the phone,

what is your number, dear,
write it down, your number,
the number must reach.


First published in Mojave River Review

 
MEKONG

Smell of burnt leaves,
a bird shoots up
into the gasoline air,
boats carry pomelo, basil, denim,
buzzing of work, hemlocks sway,
a baby asleep to the blue
of the day, two dogs,
chin down.
How does the river heal?
Crowns of water hyacinth gather
in the river’s wide mouth. 


First published in Boiler Journal



Pui Ying Wong was born in Hong Kong. She is the author of a full length book of poetry Yellow Plum Season (New York Quarterly Books, 2010), two chapbooks: Mementos (Finishing Line Press, 2007), Sonnet for a New Country (Pudding House Press, 2008) and her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Southampton Review, Crannog (Ireland), Gargoyle, Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal (Hong Kong), Taos Journal of Poetry & Art, and Valparaiso Poetry Review among others. She lives in Cambridge with her husband, the poet Tim Suermondt.

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