In summer, its white bones show. The girl
leaves her brother behind on the bank
to scout after creamy violets, crush the stalks
of the wild chives she picks inside her palm.
Greedy for borrowed beauty, she wants
to smell their oniony hearts, to lick the amber
that bottles in the copse of apple trees,
the creatures that peek from behind
the holly’s scruff—this land and its wick,
its decadent verdance torn from another tale—
footprint of a fallen barn, nail-quick of horse iron dug
from the ground. She steals what she doesn’t know
how to keep: sycamore scallops, their soft,
sueded flats like a sea turtle’s arm; the lurid pink
mulberry scent on her brother’s stained cheeks;
the creek, itself, a mouth—its dry stones the spin
on which she will hang her mind’s eye
even before she knows how to knit a scene,
before she can swim in a rose thicket, curry
its tangles, polish its tiny green teeth.
—
Iris A. Law is the author of Periodicity (Finishing Line, 2013). Her work has been published in numerous journals and appears in They Rise Like a Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Women Poets (Blue Oak, 2022) and A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry (U of Akron, 2012). In 2009, Iris cofounded Lantern Review: A Journal of Asian American Poetry, which she edited until its closure in 2022.
