August

For Connie


In an outer borough’s
vacant lot,
a bush of moonflowers
furl in the daylight.

They are sensitive to
the sun,
flaring high on the towers.

Beats of a season
boiling over.

Wait for the moon to rise
and dark rims of turf emerge,

wait for the noise to die
and the bedtime milk taken,

for muscles around the constricted larynx
to relax.

Like the fragile voices of poets’
they will open

in fullness,
in August’s cool shadows.

---

Pui Ying Wong’s new collection of poetry, The Feast, is forthcoming from MadHat Press in 2021. She has written two full-length books of poetry, An Emigrant’s Winter (Glass Lyre Press, 2016) and Yellow Plum Season (New York Quarterly Books, 2010), along with two chapbooks. She has received a Pushcart Prize. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Plume Poetry, New Letters, Zone 3, and The New York Times, among others. Born and raised in Hong Kong, she now lives in Cambridge Massachusetts with her husband, the poet Tim Suermondt.