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.