Spare the Air Day Iris A. Law (USA)

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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