Pui Ying Wong
(China-USA)
A WATERFRONT RESTAURANT
The waiter hands us
oversized knives
in a nest of avocado
and corn, the meat
bleeds, a band plays
near the bar, it’s only
Thursday. Outside,
graduates at the pavilion,
dressed in robes like a church choir
wave their diplomas and sashes.
I remember the chunks
of meat hanging
in the butcher shop
near my grandmother’s
where after school
I escorted her home
because of her poor eyesight,
the butcher unhooking
the meat and wrapping it
still dripping
in the newspaper. I watched
words absorbing the blood,
blood dissolving the words.
How strange to contain
a vanished world
inside my body which still requires
to be fed &
this & that other worlds
hopscotch while I eat
off a white plate
in a city this new summer
hearing swing music
in a room packed with tourists
or suddenly, from the graduates
a heady wave of brass
horns—
the anthem
gleams the harbor
flag-decked schooners
crisscrossing water-taxis
clambake at sunset
a lone cloud crawls.
YEAR OF THE HORSE
February just after Chinese
New Year so full
Eating rice cake
Hotpot
Primetime TV
Shows & business types
Filled the airwaves
With auspicious greetings
Prosperity
Longevity & the Best Year
That’s Here & Now
From the balcony
We saw a few barges in the bay
Tugboats moored
Behind a strip of sandbar
It seemed all of Kowloon
Was mist-cladded
Wind-stroked
Lights bounced off
Tsing Ma Bridge
Unhinged & spectral
Our evening walk
Past a bland stretch
Of road to Jordan
Prospered with Mahjong Parlor
Sauna Club & Foot Massage
A mix of Putonghua
& Cantonese
Spoken freely there
Odd to see
Out of a colony of neon
On the façade of a 70’s building
A white cross beamed
I am life
Stall after stall
Of trinkets
On Temple Street
The night market
Lipstick-Case
Lighter Calendar
Chopsticks Panda
Hook Comb
Tee Shirts Obama
Marilyn Monroe
Socks Fake-Silk X
Men Hello Kitty
A hole-in-the-wall
Snake shop
Live snakes eyes bulging
Twitched in wire cages
Who was eyeing who
The customers all men
Stepped up to the counter
As if for communion
At 8 a crowd gathered
On the boardwalk
For the light show
We walked away
Toward Hung Hum
The ferry still ran
Every half hour
It was indispensable
Then I said
You remember the poem
North Point Ferry
By Yasi written
Precisely forty years ago
At his memorial reading
A few evenings before
The same poem
Was read aloud
In French & Cantonese
Rainbow in oil-
slicked sea
Skyscrapers trembled
in puddles
But Love
Who was that bystander
Eyes black as soot
Who still went looking
For a handful of dirt
Leaning on the guardrail
Waves beneath us
We heard the cheer
From top of the towers
Lasers shot out
Across the skyline
Array of colors
Striking the clouds
A red one broke off
Like remnants
From the Eastern Sun
Straight from hell
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Bio
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 Angle Poetry (U.K.), The Brooklyner, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal (Hong Kong), Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, Crannog (Ireland), Desde Hong Kong: poets in conversation with Octavio Paz, Chameleon Press (Hong Kong), Hawaii Pacific Review, Pirene’s Fountain, Prairie Schooner, The Southampton Review, Taos Journal of Poetry & Art and 2Bridges Review among others. She lives in Cambridge, MA with her husband, the poet Tim Suermondt.