journal for new poetry
Maggie Wang
The only time I wouldn't berate you for eating too much sugar is when
we walk through that city—city of thistles and swallows, city of light,
secluded city on the edge of the plains, city seated at the right hand of
heaven, city called the capital of its own universe—when we walk
through that city spilling flakes of red lotus flour onto the streets,
where they mix with smashed cigarette butts and the pencil shavings
of seven generations of plein air artists, which look like miniature leaf
litter with their reds and oranges and browns and which the silence of
winter preserves in all their colours beneath the smatterings of coal
dust gathering on their backs like toasted black sesame blown
from the doors of a nearby bakery, from where, some also suspect,
roses are born in spring, their petals stuck together with honey lacquer
and scattered into tree pits, where they garnish the air the way the baker
signs his handiwork with the names of all the fruits I didn’t know
in my mother tongue until now—ginger, hawthorn, jujube, pineapple,
apricot, pumpkin. On the afternoons when I don’t berate you for eating
too much sugar, we walk through that city shoulder-to-shoulder and look
up through the exuberant smog until the scents of cinnamon and car exhaust,
green pea and coal smoke wash over us and love for a thing neither
of us can name bursts forth like an herb garden in uncontrolled bloom.