Today, it will be chrysanthemums. Not hers or theirs but my grandfather’s, the ones he watered and pruned and sighed over on a dismal day ---it’s been half a century. They shall lift from the clay of memory into the cay of these lines.
On a Lovely Spring Day in the Park
The teenage brother and sister approach me, looking wholesome like breakfast cereal.
They hand me a note which reads: Live Life to the Fullest.
I accept without quarrel, sooner or later they’ll learn the truth.
Between
A crossed-out opening, on the other side: white, between them so much life---Ryszard Krynicki
Between them so much life and so much death
Is that why the crumpled paper burns on both sides of the same shadow
Pui Ying Wong was born in Hong Kong. She is the author of two full-length books of poetry: An Emigrant’s Winter (Glass Lyre Press, 2016) and Yellow Plum Season (New York Quarterly Books, 2010)—along with two chapbooks. She won a 2017 Pushcart Prize. Her poems have been published in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Plume Poetry Journal, New Letters, Atlanta Review, The New York Times, The Southampton Review, among others. She lives in Cambridge, MA with her husband, the poet Tim Suermondt.
