Carnival
No Saints in the Neighborhood
Everyone walks on air,
swallows fog
out of which cities rose,
gold domes, gray spires, grazing
at clouds, at lost signals:
rooms of convex mirrors
rooms stuffed with flowers
rooms stalked of deep shadows,
long goodbyes.
Always one more road,
one more character, a clown and his
pantomime, a refugee woman
sewn to her shawl, a heartbreaker, nod
as if they know me. Even I smile
back to this world, at me.
The silhouette of an oscillating fan appears in one window
like a timid thief keeping look out both ways.
A cat struts on a tall branch, thinking she is still a cougar.
A bronze sun goddess smiles above my neighbor’s barbecue pit
till smoke and flames shoot from her mouth on a hot July day.
The pigeon coop next door tilts more each year
and everyone is predicting the time of its demise, since
the owner died and the pigeons no longer come cooing for food.
Satellite dishes have populated the roof and married
the family of chimney pots, broken antennas, trash,
sometimes migratory birds in shock of red or subdued caramel.
At 3am I hear the hissing wind and imagine the Burning Bush.
Where are the Prophets, their premonitions and revelations?
Darkness swallows chairs, keys, shoes in its one-tone dark.
I hear the chaos in my mind like the sound of footsteps ascending
and descending, hovering between the living and the dead.
Pui Ying Wong was born in Hong Kong. She is the author of a full length book of poetry Yellow Plum Season (New York Quarterly Books, 2010), two chapbooks: Mementos (Finishing Line Press, 2007), Sonnet for a New Country (Pudding House Press, 2008) and her poems in Boiler Journal, Crannog (Ireland), Gargoyle, Prairie Schooner, The New Poet, The Southampton Review, Ucity Review, and Valparaiso Poetry Review among others. She lives in Cambridge with her husband, the poet Tim Suermondt.
