Jonathan Chin
NYC/Boston

                      January 19, 2005

It's something
like how everything
is a slow thing near
water flowing. Shuttle buses
shooting back to New York
amass endless threads of rain like chains
and we are the missing links.
rattling across the interstate
with a vacuous plinck-plinck.
Time crept up on us, turning a 4-hour ride into 8.
Meanwhile, we idled away, sunken in our seats,
watching water scour scum from the windows
with its fingertip beads of rain.
We drowned in our own nostalgia,
lost in a sea of conjured memories
of who we were before Boston.
We wondered what had changed
while we were away at our lay-a-way lives:
old bedrooms stripped bare
because baby brothers outgrew theirs;
fathers gambling again;
mothers not sleeping when
it was midnight and we weren't there.

But cumulous nimbus kept nimble vigilance
over our houses in Queens.
They were preserved like it was 1994;
everyone stayed indoors for fear of rain or change
so that our pilgrimage home
was heralded by some
light drizzling as if we weren't welcome
because we had become adults
when they still wanted children.

All it took was spilled salt at dinner
like spume to mount tensions like tidal waves
and I storm out on to the street,
a feather of wind become a tsunami
become a whimper again
when I realize I have no where else to go.
20 year old man on the corner
in his grey undershirt and jeans.
Water trickling from the sky
and from his eyes
reminding him he'll have to come back in soon.

Later on in Boston, where skies run like rivers,
we're on the wrong side looking out.
Here we are, living dollar to dollar,
hour to hour, trying to keep our heads above water.

Home

                      March 16, 2005
      New York at daybreak belongs to just me
             -Agha Shahid Ali, Ghazal

It’s like driving into a pool of light
the way they shimmer it is hard to tell
the windows from the river. Both are silver
and just like that I try to lose the night

mares among the fanfare of better dreams.
I try to recover this Protestant
immigrant city so that it can
be holy again. Take crack off the streets.

No more drug dealing during lunch periods.
Clip all airplane wings if it comes to that.
Replace pamphlets against Iraq with sheets
of poetry to be read on Central Park Rocks.

A burnt-out neon motel sign would spell,
without the “T” and leg of “M”: Noel.

<< Back to Issue 8, 2005