Regretful Thoughts from Isolation and Other Poems
Art By Amy Luo
Regretful Thoughts from Isolation
I feel as if I must depend on fate
For as the world’s careening to its end
All I can do for now, it seems, is wait.
Unsent to you, I fear: am I too late?
Too many words of love from my quill penned
I feel as if I must depend on fate.
Morose behind a steely, solid gate
I’m impotent to will the bars to bend.
All I can do for now, it seems, is wait.
I thought my love could suffering abate,
But now, a thousand miles from nearest friend,
I feel as if I must depend on fate.
Do you still think of me? With spite? With hate?
O answer me! Foreshamed - did I offend?
...All I can do, for now, it seems, is wait.
I wish not silence to perpetuate
But from such distance, how can breakage mend?
I feel as if I must depend on fate.
All I can do for now, it seems, is wait.
“An Inheritance”; or “Reflections on a Question I Try Not to Think About Too Often”
my mother sleeps with the blood
of the colonizer on her thighs.
his left hand draped over her side,
the gilded band on his fourth finger, a chain link plucked
from a history of metal. steel and bronze and gun gray,
now plated over with some pithy gold.
still a chain link, is it (?) on her finger,
matching his, but tighter.
i echo her folly.
so says the four-fingered bruise on my hip,
pretty, perfect circles on my smooth, gold skin
once white, now purple with love’s wound.
the right hand of my lover draped over my side –
if there were a mirror on the ceiling,
would i see her there? her same black eyes, her stare,
awake, awide, unable to sleep beside
a man so foreboding? the tiny woman in his arms,
twisted in his lily vines, exotic bride,
her same small hands, brown skin, black hair –
Jesus christ, i look like her.
is that not she, lying there? and my father,
but taller, and thinner, with lighter hair?
it must be her, though that may not be he –
i don’t know, they all look the same to me.
but let’s talk marriage. the Big Transaction
that signs me away –
still my (white) father gives me away –
then, like my parents, for twenty-five years
will i spin the band on my left hand
whenever i start to think too hard
about how gold is a shade of yellow
and platinum is a shade of white?
i’d sooner bite and tear the digit off.
i paint myself with the blood of the colonizer on my lips.
he like the red on me, he says.
i smile like an island cheshire cat:
my placid eyes with slanted pupils and
my grin with the teeth of the savage beast
to be hidden behind painted, closed lips.
smiling or otherwise.
Sonnet from the Poet Lover
I have before known love, and learned it’s true
That oft the scales of love unbalanced lie.
But in all my endeavors, all but you,
I’ve not before sat on the weightier side.
If love’s poetics always you deny me,
My lover’s scrawlings down my pockets weight,
Eros’ presumed contract did then belie me,
For there above you stand, on higher plate.
I’ll take the hurt, for what have I to do
But dream, but write, of wishing loving pure?
I’d sooner drown in my own love for you
Than sit, dry in my idling, on safe shore.
For balance is the poet lover’s yearn,
And thus, the poet suffers, ne’er to learn.