Walking home with groceries
Warrick Rd. crowns in a hill
scattered with beer cans
and weeds that stand in for grass,
a hard-packed slope which,
if I were eight or eleven again
and passing this place with little
brother in tow, we might have
charged up the face of, jostling
each other for foothold and calling
across the flares of amber light as we did
in our own four acres once; or digging,
armed with sticks, we may have unearthed
treasure: green clay turtles, rusted pitchforks,
headless garden statuary. One might
exhume a skeleton here, or sealed-up mine,
an entrance to another world
all heaped over with dirt and bits of stone.
on being far away, in january
a love letter.
nothing grows in snow this thick.
even the bugs are in hibernation.
we haven't had so much as an ant
in months. everything is so white –
i'm starved for color. the trees must
be blooming where you are by now.
lush and wet. i miss the profusion,
green against gray. early magnolia
outside the windows. oranges falling
from the trees by the post office.
will you send me the scent of lemons?
the sound of rain on terracotta tile?
anemones spilling over the freeway?
the yellow of their petals, and yourself,
bicycling down the plum-pink lanes
in the bluest of raincoats, piercing
the frame of the reddest sky?
Iris A. Law is an MFA in Poetry candidate at the University of Notre Dame. Her works have appeared in The Bend, Writers Connect, and Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. Iris is the Editor of Lantern Review: A Journal of Asian American Poetry.
Warrick Rd. crowns in a hill
scattered with beer cans
and weeds that stand in for grass,
a hard-packed slope which,
if I were eight or eleven again
and passing this place with little
brother in tow, we might have
charged up the face of, jostling
each other for foothold and calling
across the flares of amber light as we did
in our own four acres once; or digging,
armed with sticks, we may have unearthed
treasure: green clay turtles, rusted pitchforks,
headless garden statuary. One might
exhume a skeleton here, or sealed-up mine,
an entrance to another world
all heaped over with dirt and bits of stone.
on being far away, in january
a love letter.
nothing grows in snow this thick.
even the bugs are in hibernation.
we haven't had so much as an ant
in months. everything is so white –
i'm starved for color. the trees must
be blooming where you are by now.
lush and wet. i miss the profusion,
green against gray. early magnolia
outside the windows. oranges falling
from the trees by the post office.
will you send me the scent of lemons?
the sound of rain on terracotta tile?
anemones spilling over the freeway?
the yellow of their petals, and yourself,
bicycling down the plum-pink lanes
in the bluest of raincoats, piercing
the frame of the reddest sky?
Iris A. Law is an MFA in Poetry candidate at the University of Notre Dame. Her works have appeared in The Bend, Writers Connect, and Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. Iris is the Editor of Lantern Review: A Journal of Asian American Poetry.
