The day before the end of the world
The golden domes of government buildings were blindingly bright, returning the rhinestone and tinsel reflection of the sun into their citizens’ eyes.
People strolled the public parks, admiring squirrels
digging and hiding their caches for the winter
never to come.
People stocked up on toilet paper, canned foods, disinfectant wipes. Donna said, at one store, the rice and candy aisles were wiped empty.
The day before the end of the world
Memorials were being restored
Ambulances and fire engines silenced their sirens
The most militant countries aimed their missiles
and set their timers
I found in an inner pocketbook zipper a stash of money and postage stamps as old as 1901.
For the first time in my life, I knelt down and prayed. I mean, really prayed. I thought of how tumultuous, loud, and dirty and full of calamity the world had been. I thought of my father in the hospital bed, how I held his hand as an oblong tear slipped slowly out his left eye, how doctors and residents had told us there was nothing left to do, how I watched the screen as his blood pressure and heart rate dropped, and dropped, until they both fell to zero.
And here was the world, wilting to its final zero.
The big OH of NO on the lips of everyone
And Billie Holiday whispered to me
Hush now, don’t explain, just say you’ll remain.
I touched my forehead to the grasses, and made up biblical verses
The path of destruction is the way to glory
The path to glory is braving the mangled mess
I sang to the Whitman grasses
You know that I love you,
And what love endures
And they swayed to the breeze of my breath though I sang
offkey
The whole friggin’ world keyed up and singing the day before the end of the world
The Long Haul
If you were here, I'd haul you
out of town
for a shady hike
along a ridgeline.
Time-stamped 6.40am
on a Monday,
Rembrandt’s 407th birthday,
600 hundred summer
miles between us and questions
hitched at every exit.
Can we have it all?
That first hike we took,
deer softly trotted behind
trees and we strolled up to a star
running on electricity. Maybe
it’s a matter of faith
whose knotted strings
ornithologists and cosmologists
have yet to learn
to untangle.
*
How much time apart is enough,
how much distance too much,
and how long should relationships last?
Between people,
between territory and inhabitants,
between eons, earth and ether?
Last, a word stretching the length
of time,
everything travels its path of
endurance, and all hurtle towards it.
When a bird pecks a carcass,
when the echidna, our last
nontherian egg-laying mammal
extinguishes,
when the creek dries and cracks,
our hands wrinkle and shrink
and we lose movement and
sentience altogether,
do the electric pigeons
out of mercy finally speak,
and apologize for
their long silence?
Is their foreign speech
that blinding light
at tunnel’s end some
have reportedly seen?
Will they allow a question
and answer session or will they
just coo to lull, allay our
synthetic fears?
Oblique as the angle
they flew in from before
landing then perching on
a halting chest?
What if every answer is
individualized, we really
should not ask outward,
but inward?
What if every answer is a phantom,
a shadow free to adhere or fly
from its question, like wigs and scarves
from a dummy?
*
The summer we became
friends, Doug planned
and planted the garden
and periphery
to his new home,
and I went with him
to purchase seeds, plants,
flowers,
plus a napkin-sized square of grass
he let me set on the flatbed
because I liked its plush blades,
the potential
something so small could
replicate, cover the yard,
wrap around the house.
We dug holes, planted
hostas and purple palaces
by the deck, fiddlehead ferns
in the backyard and pansies
and petunias
on either side of steps
leading to the walkway
to his front door. I’d
never owned a home
so never a yard, and this
felt close and permanent,
marking someone’s land,
like a ghost greeter.
*
Resembling a clod of dried dirt
and sticks, no wonder the echidna
has survived so long, looking
already buried.
*
Doug admits
he is still not sure what
he wants life
to be like when he grows up.
Am I supposed to know
and reply,
I the person who once asked
him to pull over on a dirt road
so I could get a closer look
at Foamhenge?
*
It’s been a good life,
I told Susan recently.
Been? It’s not over yet,
she said, and we looked
out her kitchen window
at the tree where each year
robins lay eggs, then train
the hatched ones
to fly, if they get a chance
to hatch, if squirrels
do not fright the parents
and steal the eggs.
Susan says she hates squirrels
now that she has seen
what they do to the robins,
the poor parents
who take turns at the same
time each day, switching shifts
on nest duty, food gathering,
or sleeping.
Life kills, but we do not
hate life. Anger does not
make the killing go away
or alter its work.
*
His first wife, second wife,
and four children all died
before Rembrandt. The last child
lived to 27.
*
No one has a record of the year
my father was born in his village.
It was written on a scrap,
then lost.
That same year, a dozen other
unhappy births: Ten of these
children would starve before
reaching the age of ten.
They were births and deaths,
their names lost in parched
soil, their future an agreement
to forget.
What if all the paintings
in the museum were mislabeled?
*
All month, I want to write
or call a co-worker
to ask how she is doing,
but am afraid
how she might answer,
the sores in her mouth,
her nails falling out
from therapy.
Afraid to tire her with
a message when she should
conserve energy, I also worry
she might not reply.
After all her hair fell out,
I figured her secret was out
and bought her a rare lily
to plant
in her garden, where she had
spoken of spending her days
after retirement, after the three
daughters she has raised
as a single mom finished college.
I had never heard of cancer
patients who could not be
near flowers
because their immune systems
are so weak. But she wrapped
the lilies in a plastic bag, carried
them home
on the train and I worried
over her commute, whether
I would make her more sick.
Both got home safe.
Whether that plant now wavers
in summer’s third heat wave,
if my friend feels better
or worse, I do not know.
*
The echidna has three options
when faced with danger:
run away on its short, stubby legs,
dig, or curl up.
*
After my father broke
his hip, he did not go
to the emergency room
until a day later.
In hospital, in much pain,
he yelled at a nurse
who had turned him
roughly,
he had shouted so harshly
that nurses spiked his pain
killers to the point he started
to speak to his father,
dead over thirty years ago,
to his brother and sister
way back in China, in the 1930s,
hunting scarce food.
I thought the medicine
had taken him
too far away for him ever
to return.
A person may crawl to a gate
to beg death to open wide
and drape its obliterating pall
across a gruesome scene,
can cry out shamelessly for life
to desert him, release him, but life
is a sadist, as is death, who likes
drawn out dramatic stories.
As much as he scrunched his body
as though to squeeze the pain out,
it answered by locking the bolt,
then knocking in mockery.
There must be psychological
limits, and purpose, to how
much pain
we must feel.
*
In Magritte’s 1926 painting,
Le Plaisir, a young girl
devours
a live bird.
In the park, I tried to stop
a seagull snapping the neck
of a poor, limp pigeon.
Twice I leapt
toward the gull, shouting “Stop!”
The gull undeterred.
The pigeon would be in more pain
if it were released.
*
Sometimes a quiet sea calms,
an arrangement of stars explains.
Sometimes quiet is so loud
one must drown it with noise.
In the portrait gallery, those faces,
the poses, ermine and devoutness,
the way light lives on the canvas,
hold all eternity.
Everything is anonymous,
wordless, deathbound, frazzled
and fading. The majestic dust
and workmanship.
I wonder if the echidna
have a language, how far
back they or their cells
can remember
from 200 million years ago,
if they survived on account
of their solitary nature, like
prehistoric Buddhas,
if ever we will develop
technology to translate
and speak
across species,
if ever we will learn to live
without the lives that have travelled
beside us, then in their time
leave us.
*
What if it is best
to err? What if we highlight
some words and call them
prophecy?
Pigeons have already spoken
and asked: What more do you want
when time has passed…
and more flowers have opened?
When faced with options:
choose danger, pain, paint, dig, plant.
Yim Tan Wong was born in Hong Kong and raised in Fall River, Massachusetts. She has been a Kundiman Emerging Asian American Poets Fellow and holds an MFA in poetry and fiction from Hollins University. Her first poetry collection has been a finalist for the Gaudy Boy Poetry Prize, Octopus Books’ open reading period, Four Way Books’ Levis Prize, and the Alice James Books/Kundiman Poetry Prize. Most recently, in 2024, her work appeared in the WOC (Women of Color) Borders & Boundaries Anthology. A Pushcart nominee, her poems have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, The Adirondack Review, Cream City Review, A cappella Zoo, Phoebe, RATTLE, and Crab Orchard Review. A collage she made using lines from one of her poems has been included in the Chiharu Shiota installation “Home Less Home” at the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Art) Watershed location in East Boston, MA, on view through September 2025.