Two Poems by Marco Yan
This is a selection from our Fall/Winter 2020 issue. Please click here to purchase a print or digital version of the full issue featuring prose, poetry, and art from over 20 artists.
ANOTHER MOON
Before leaving Hong Kong, I was told there’s only one
moon orbiting Earth, that it appears the same wherever
I decide to squander a year, but the luminous sphere
above Brooklyn is deviant, vast, not the vision of
the Mid-Autumn Festival of my childhood. On the roof,
my housemates and I share a mooncake, some longan,
some jasmine tea, unspooling tales about the celestial.
Nearing thirty, we’re still children who see only metaphors.
We’re pilgrims who follow the glow, our minds the candles
burning in a tin box, all wax and flames. And the moon,
oh the moon is a hare, now a priestess fleeing in haste,
now a broken mirror becoming whole, the reflection
of an old man driving home his blue Mustang along
the riverbank, the radio static, one headlight broken.
BRUISED JASMINES
How not to blame them?
Before casting the pink mess to the kitchen rot which now flowers,
I pull out the softened stems, the slime, other impurities.
I have numbered the days of withering disguised as florescence.
Those nights I leaned in, inhaled—if only innocence was a scent.
I remember settling the fresh bouquet in tepid water, tossing
a nickel into the makeshift vase, a coppery wish for microbes not to grow.
Good things should stay on the verge of festering.
Half-naked by the sink, I sweated through the afternoon, pruning the parts
we didn’t need to be beautiful.
When I brought them home from the florist’s, they had so many leaves—
green havoc, green lineography on the plastic wrap they’d courted.
It was Sunday, a casual walk after lust, after
all the crumbs had been picked, the way back no longer visible,
and I wanted to see some signifiers of life on display.
The street, unevenly paved, flanked with plants, a series of thresholds.
I crossed each of them thinking I was unchanged.
In the transactions of cash and cut flowers, the vendors hollered,
and I chose those quiet flames to burn in my room—
allure, yes, ambivalence too, then gradually, grace for days.
Marco Yan is a Hong Kong-based poet whose work appears in The Scores, Cordite Poetry Review, and Third Coast, among other places. He received his MFAs from NYU and HKU.
