Lechmere
Sierra and Tango, twin apartments
looking out to the railroad tracks.
The Orange Line runs here, a double-decker train
departs for Salem, Swampscott, Rockport,
stations conjure up the sea and light
and the daily trip to the general store.
Now we face the big Pharma,
multi-floor labs, bio-meds, red
lights pulsing on top of the buildings
housing Philips, Sanofi, Bristol Myers Squibb.
Now the sun
crushes itself on the glass walls,
workers in slim suits take over the park,
even asleep bright lights from the offices
dim our dreams.
Nathan Road, Hong Kong
ARE WE THERE YET
“In the spring of 2020, as Covid-19 was beginning to take its awful toll, The US started by ‘flattening the curve’— and never came up with a plan for what comes next. New York City would see 10,000 cases and nearly 1,000 deaths every day by early April.”–Vox, December 31, 2020
do you love
what
you see
the air is
exhilarating
so close to
goddamn where
we are dangling
at the edge of the water
we are dancing
on the golden sand
you got me dancing with you
even wildflowers ache
only, you shrug
forget me then
don’t forget how I love you
my out-of-breath dancing
too late for fiction
too much data
climb
climb
climb
but a false one
and a false one
this could be the summit
we are really paper tigers swimming in the lava
we are going up we are riding out the curve
are you scared?
how thin the air is, the beeping heart-machines, the humming oxygen flow,
I have no idea
we won’t be saved by a navy ship now the sea is a rising darkness
it was always our meadow to squander
Pui Ying Wong is the author of Fanling In October (Barrow Street Press, 2023) and 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. Her poems have appeared in many journals including Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Plume, Chautauqua, 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.