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| 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), Pirene’s Fountain, Prairie Schooner, The Southampton Review and 2Bridges Review among others. She lives in Cambridge, MA with her husband. She recently won the PUSHCART PRIZE for her poetry and is a member of the Somerville Bagel Bards |
AN
EMIGRANT’S WINTER
That winter,
water froze in the pipes
and the
faucet wheezed like asthma.
Icicles
teethed along the power line,
I opened my
mouth and my speech stuttered.
The entire
city lived in a snow globe,
even big men
trod timidly in the wind, hiding their faces
like shamed
felons caught by the TV camera.
The market
sold out everything,
a young boy
snatched the last pack of meat.
Sleet fell
all night, tapping
on the
windows the way the dead might.
In my dream
I went back to the house
that had
forgotten about me,
not one
there asked how I’d been.
But I sat
with them just the same,
watching TV
like I had never left.
Who will
remember what, who can say?
Mornings
punctured by sounds of dragging snowplows,
I peeped at
the sun, the feeble white disc,
failed again
to burn off the clouds.
It was so cold
I could think of fire
and only
fire.
First
published in deComp
Pui Ying
Wong
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