3 Poems – Iris A. Law (USA)

Bones
Tyrannosaurus Rex Skeleton, the Field Museum.

If I slipped my hand
up under the strong curved
lines of your ribs, or trailed
my palm along the jut
of your coal-black thigh, would
you notice its warm pressure,
feel its remove from your fleshless
existence, collagen and keratin
startling against your naked bones?

A small boy chases a girl around
your cordon, clinging and dodging,
patella and tibia the axis of their whirling game.
They call to each other through the gaps
in your vertebrae, peer at each other through your pelvis,
stare straight down your skull from teeth to tail,
you’re-not-gonna-get-me!, their eyes like hungry stars.

Do you remember the feeling of pursuit,
reptilian desire, the sound of small feet
scuttling through ferns while your eyes darted,
tongue out, chin and tail following — again
and again until time itself fell, with a rush
of flame, into the black, sulphurous night?

Airport, T-Minus-Four Hours
Waiting for a flight that has been delayed by 6.5 hours.

Having eaten my apple and returned my book to its dust jacket,
I sit, staring straight forward, keeping time to the bump
of bags rolling over linoleum as the light glances off the aileron
of a passing plane, slips across the face of the woman sitting beside me.

She is slumped forward in sleep, newspaper pressed to her cheek
like a pillow, purse gathered beneath her coat as if she were clutching
a small child to her chest. There is something alien about the sun’s angling
through the runway glass, the way it falls in white squares across her cheek,
is blocked and refracted as steel bodies glide through it: darkness, and then sharp rays.

One could spend all day caught in the gray void between terminals
and never know that night had come and gone at home, the light
having followed you from one time zone to the other while
your mother – on one coast – folds down the sheets for bed; while
your lover, on the other coast – washes vegetables for dinner.

I wonder if my neighbour keeps time to another city, as well —
if, as the light spills about her, her body consciously practices
a sacrament of remembrance – how to kiss a daughter goodnight,

how to switch off the lamp and curl into bed with husband or lover,
how to settle her head towards the East in prayer, or perhaps instinct,
trusting in the familiar presence of the wall on which she knows the sun
will rise, flushing the bedroom curtains red, in the morning.

Spare the Air Day

San Francisco breaks out in carnival colours.
It seems the whole city has turned out
in spontaneous celebration. Even the sun is jubilant,

dancing over stuccoed walls and crooked wire fences,
splashing hipster one-stories with lipstick pinks and sky-stone blues,
mixing them in against the stubble of the sunburned hills,
a mural as colourful as the people now crowding onto the Muni.

The driver is sporting bold black fishnets this morning.
She rattles the FREE TODAY sign on her fare box with glee
“Had to do something different,” she smirks,
“I’d get arrested for driving naked.”

The inside of the vehicle rumbles to life as it hits Van Ness.
The commuter crowd, in their twinsets and suits,
shifts uncomfortably as the city crowds in around them.

Grandmothers hobble on board, clutching groceries and gossiping
in Cantonese, their tongues as sharp as kitchen cleavers.
A group of disabled adults ambles happily towards a stop,
chattering happily to their caretakers, who, just for today,
wear smiles untainted by shadows.

At Mission Street, woman with a wrinkled face
and an oversized pink coat gets on.
She swings her bag up onto the seat and shouts,
“Happy holiday!” her mouth splitting into a toothless grin.
Though it isn’t a holiday, everybody beams back
as she slides onto the bench. Behind her head,
the sky dots itself with marshmallow clouds.

Iris A. Law will receive her M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Notre Dame in May 2010. Her work has appeared in The Bend and in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal and was recently nominated for the 2009 Best of the Net Anthology. Iris is also the editor of the new online magazine Lantern Review: A Journal of Asian American Poetry.

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