Becalmed City, Hong Kong
The ultra-modern train pulls into the station
smooth as an informant’s gloved hand.
Former newsrooms, union halls, and
student clubs have all been shuttered,
even teashops are quiet.
The city’s topography is unchanged, streets,
parks, bus lines, a far-flung prison
no one believes was built for them.
At the press conference the ministers of justice
appear well-rested, friendly reporters yawn.
But in the wee hours the homeless emerge
from underpasses,
the accused write long letters in their cells,
and in the dream of the sleepless
flowers grow on stone walls,
a glorious anthem still plays.
Sister Sisyphus on Third Street
Not even the postman knows where she lives.
The woman walking with her four large maroon
suitcases has become a frequent sight.
She pushes two of them up the block
then comes back for the others,
again and again.
It takes her a whole morning to cross
the neighborhood.
Sometimes people say hello. Sometimes they
let her be.
The great mystery is the contents inside,
which nobody knows.
Sometimes I think I understand.
What we are walking with. What is still visible.
Provincetown
On the way to the late poet’s house,
the grey sea placid,
a red Volkswagen beetle
on the side of the road,
bare trees, bags of compost.
The house hard to see from the street.
The beloved garden ripped open,
maybe a new owner,
another holiday let,
the poet’s labor
gone.
A cough, a laugh, one hears
now and then, shops with cheerful
closed-for-the-season signs,
a chat about monkeypox
and gas prices trails off, then,
only the sea’s gentle lapping.
Pui Ying Wong is the author of Fanling in October (Barrow Street Press, 2023) as well as three other poetry collections, The Feast, An Emigrant’s Winter, and Yellow Plum Season, along with two chapbooks, Sonnet For a New Country and Mementos. She has received a Pushcart Prize and her poems have appeared in many journals, including Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Plume, Chicago Quarterly Review, New Letters, Zone 3, and others. Born in Hong Kong, she now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband, the poet Tim Suermondt.
Header photo by YIUCHEUNG, courtesy Shutterstock.
