so suffused is the night with cicada song that the evening chews and swallows it whole. like a long glass of milk, like butter swirling into soup, the streetlights all but stifled this far west. you take my hand and trace from point to point: tail, then haunches of the bear, ladle of doubt spilling headlong into the still, black pool. there, as clean as i’ve ever seen it: a setting of seven, diamantine against the dark. carefully twisted into labeled prongs whose names i always forget. you shake the loose nuggets, hold them to loup, against the light, the way i’ve watched my father test a topaz, plying the trade passed down from his parents: look for the little flame at the heart.
maybe we were made for this: to flame out as far as the eye can see—in praise of brilliance, sun, a little cool water to quell the ache in the caverns of our chests. the way a starling flocks to its brothers as the garnet ball dives at the horizon. how, in rising, the moon waits patiently at the lip of the car window’s frame, the summer follows us home.
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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.
