Geography
Come back, Temujin,
to your khari—your kin
with names these days like James
and Christina. We watch
the news, call our families to say
be cautious when you go where
Asians are known to go, be vigilant
in supermarkets, coffee shops,
doctors’ offices. Parks
outside doctors’ offices. Sidewalks.
Walk away quickly
when anyone hisses, Get the fuck out
of our country keep your fucking
virus away from us you fucking chinks.
Classrooms. Bus stops.
I want to go back
eight hundred years, to Tabriz,
to my ancestors—Kaifeng’s doctors
you dispatched to Persia
to teach at the school you built.
No, nothing was unimaginable
to you, not whole orchards carried
from Chang’an to Samarkand, not small
Mongol horses charging through
every river—on every shore, riots
of water flung at the sky. Temujin,
conjure again for us the geography
you made, when you entrusted
your khan’s body to foreigners
and named us your kin. Come back,
Temujin: your khari remembers you,
and our grief cannot wait.
Marco Polo Returns
On the last evening, I walk through
the city—its multitudes of strange
tongues, the markets full
of apricots, aloes, crushed cardamom.
It’s summer again,
when the folk go north, their hunting
leopards leashed lightly with silk
riding their own horses, the tigers
following behind, and I am now fourteen years
in Cambulac and a quarter century gone
from home. I hardly remember
Venice—its faded, narrow canals—
but Kublai tells me not to compare,
says we both have made some good
stories. He consoles me with a paiza
so I do not forget his great deeds, reminds me
I can come back. Why can’t I, now
on the ship’s sun-dazzled deck, picture
Xanadu’s spring grass, white tents and banners
trembling? His face, the sky.
M. Cynthia Cheung is the author of Common Disaster (Acre Books, 2025). Her poems can be found in AGNI, Gulf Coast, The Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, swamp pink, among others, and she is the recipient of the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America. She practices internal medicine in Texas.