by Hon-Wai Wong

The Heights of Your Shoulders

Strained
by the heaviness
of mountains,
wounded by fevered howls
and the knives
of downpour and sweat,
your shoulders
bear a continent.
It has endured great battles
and emerged
an infinite land
whose trails of daisy
flourish even in the night.
See these hands: they are clumsy drifters.
They seek your shoulders’ wisdom.
Let them build stone fires
and scale your shoulder blades.
Let them wander, lost,
on your clavicle-ridges.
Let them wade and drown
in your skin of deep, luminous honey.

While the Hills Fade and the Makeshift Clinic Stirs
Tegucigalpa, Honduras

You share your mother’s smell
of soil and rainfall
and you watch me
with the quiet ballet
of brown eyes and lashes
like a dandelion
flourishing in the breeze
that brings the evening
and you rest cocooned
in a cloth, your forehead
too soft for the shuffle
of a fly.

Hon-Wai Wong grew up in the valley-city of Ipoh, Malaysia and studied at the Johns Hopkins University. Exploring the body as landscape, Hon-Wai’s poems (will) appear in The Bitchin’ Kitsch, Heather, and The Hopkins Review.