After rain, dragonflies
shimmer eye high
over a footbridge,

sprinkle sun
like holy water on
every morning pilgrim.

Send article as PDF to

Early morning, three
go slow against a sleepy
river of child soldiers
marching to someone’s idea
of a good war. The driver
of a small car honks
at every one as though
he thinks the sound will
make them turn
and say no,

but they flow
like water
around a rock
that has fallen
into the stream,
and he moves on
at the pace they set.

Another, in an SUV, is accustomed to moving
people. But his machine is a boulder
in this river, and slow
is as fast as he can go.

I wade upstream, thinking
poetry, avoiding
collisions, changing

nothing.

Send article as PDF to

Moon’s collar
and star’s button in my shirt.
Brumous feet of a gazelle running on the back of hills
in my shirt.
Desire to meet the gold-haired girl
in my shirt.
Ire of fathers
and discontent of the guards of society
in my shirt.
Romance of a summer-evening
and the excitement of autumn
in my shirt.
Bands of seasons
in my shirt.
Yes my dear! Drums of clouds
in my shirt!

Send article as PDF to

I am mortal
but the book that I write so meticulously
is more mortal.
I am mortal
but my photographs kept in this album
are no less mortal than me,
penned down over so many years
these diaries of mortal-me
are even more mortal –
and how fleeting is my faith
that I would take these along beyond time.
I order my statues in my own lifetime
all made differently
these statues of mine
are no less mortal
which are forgotten immediately after anniversaries.
These letters that I write
are still more fleeting
they would be burnt up
with matchsticks, at the year-end.

Whatever I gift
falls apart in a few days
a gift lasts a year
good wishes last four days
I desperately endeavour to prove that
the inert, indestructible and immortal things I possess,
are beyond time
but all disappear gradually
like snowballs.
Words are immortal
someone says,
but how do I believe my own words
which dissolve in merely a couple of water drops.

Send article as PDF to

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.

Send article as PDF to

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.

Send article as PDF to

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?

Send article as PDF to

I don’t anymore get impressed by sudden things
like thunderclaps or surprise birthday parties.
What I had wanted to say that September,

increments of sunlight bursting open
the hearts of surrounding children, is that
I wish instead I have grown old knowing

how to fish, for example, or to swim.
I walk into bookstores and feel
so much ache in their finish

and in distant starts and forgotten
narratives, or a light put out because
there is so much sadness in darkness.

I should have begun with something like
How to begin? A brittle din of rain begins
on the rooftop and it’s supposed to be

a good thing. The kids are asleep
and the commonplace bed waits
like all consolations, things we do not

question: the inconsistency of seasons,
politics, or the meaning of a poem.
Like I am still roaming another

country, encountering sentiment
all over again, meeting new faces
and the sadness that blossoms

in all the wrong places because
I simply want to remain
caught in rain, drunk within it,

running away to far-off shelters
and swapping the present with gifts
of what I simply have to let go –

the simple past, older windows
looking out to the same scenery:
strange signs in airports, rain in Manila,

and that Autumn that I have exchanged
for the fallen Peso, foreign pictures
of snow, and better news about

the weather, come whenever.

Send article as PDF to

I don’t anymore want melody
with its want for pleasing and pattern
and why should I have it lilting in the background
when consoling relatives? My heart
is forged for frailty and failure.
I am accepting this now: its many vessels
leading to sorrow, its southpaw stance. I pin
a right hand over it at times, out of duty or
earnestness or just to check if it’s still there. Yes,
there is always some grand grief in its capacity
to quiet everything, eventually. And I do not cherish
such knowledge. So every day I work it,
this heart, pacing it because I hate syncopation.
Skip that. I want complete monotone. I prefer
the metronome, cadence. I insist on heart.

Send article as PDF to

I consider legends of the constellations, lovers
that revolve around each other perpetually
unsatisfied. That brief time we shared a room
you’d smile in your sleep, turning your face
toward me. You were disarming.
Our connection was tenuous and fragile
as the bonsai bought in China,
crushed into my camera bag, carried
through Mongolia and Taiwan,
smuggled past Customs into the country.
Across a black sky soft and smooth as old cloth
.

…………tonight the stars cling like lint. The red sign
…………of the Merit gas station across the street flicks on and off
…………pulsing red light through my windows that touches mementos
…………as though they were smoothed rocks rising
…………up through water with barely a ripple, a bracelet
…………of wooden prayer beads, tiny teacup with crackled glaze.
…………Etched in fine ink lines
….……..the Seven Immortals dance in a circle
….……..around the small gourd set on its pedestal
…………on my coffee table, as though whirling about
.

the capsule of air preserved
at hollow core. In Hong Kong
the chef slung coils of dough for whistle noodles
through the air above his head, thumped them down
on the table in the instant our eyes met. Creased map marked in blue,
.

…………Yu-chia sleeps on my couch
…………like the open half of an abalone shell,
…………arms curved, relinquishing. Her dreams twine through my rooms,
…………faint, bearing a pearly sheen, figures in a trajectory of contentment,
…………not a hurtling so fast that stone

disintegrates. In the museum at Zhangzhou
artifacts preserved in display cases, a sliver of bone, ancient
section of a city wall of earth —
through streets thickly overarched by French sycamores
we came out into brilliance. What
can I keep of you
.

…………to kindle into light?
…………The bonsai unfolds its delicate leaves,
…………resilient. She leaves me as a gift
…………a bag of dried mushrooms, whose aroma
…………and rich taste in broth, as of dark meat, game,
…………permeate deep as forest shadows overlapped
…………on black soil where the dissolving fallen leaves
…………merge their fine vertebrae.

Send article as PDF to