First published in Third Wednesday Vol. XI, No. 3 http://thirdwednesday.org/

Detour

In the end, where you go is not
where you wanted to be, your lane
rerouted, no choice but to follow
the coned curves furthering you
away from the bridge arcing ahead,
flaring over deep water, ships lumbering
their goods to port. You try the exit going east
then another going south, threads crossing
in a knot that cannot be untangled.
Your son starts to cry. So instead of
the place with the crayons and chicken piccata,
the one you both love to the point of ritual,
you stop at a battered metal cart on the side
of a road plumed with dust and buy hot dogs.
And because your hunger is so great, it satisfies.

***

Grandpa’s Love Language Is Warnings

Grey-smudged newspaper clippings
arrive in envelopes, my address
written in shaky letters, listing
which fish are highest in mercury,
telling me all the chickens have cancer,
how sugar is addictive as cocaine
and the caramel lodged in the roof
of my mouth will lead to diabetes.

All the visits of my childhood, he kept
Vitamin C tablets in a baggie in his
trouser pocket, slipping me one as a treat,
the chalky sweet-sour puckering,
watering my mouth.

After twenty years of deep sighs
and pronouncements he didn’t
have much longer to live, he lies
in a hospital bed eating ice cream,
wondering why it is taking him so long
to die. Why his body has dragged him
all the way to ninety-five. When I say,
I guess it was all that healthy living,
his hand pauses on its upward path
and he blinks.

I hadn’t thought of that, he says,
then lips the last sweet bite of vanilla
off the little wooden spoon.

Migration

Brake lights, sudden flare of red
across the lanes of the 5 freeway
though they stretch open and clear,
the ease of a mild March Saturday.

Perhaps some broken tools bounced
from the back of a truck, or a tire
flung loose into lanes. Silence, then
a hundred swirls of yellow descend,

filling the air, hitting my windshield
in muted plops. Sound of raindrops,
but not rain, nor paper fluttering,
but something alive—bodies,

ripe fruit bodies colliding with
the unyielding glass and metal of my
two-ton car. Of all the two-ton cars
braking, swerving, slowing to a fraction

of the speed limit. There is no
avoiding them, no way to even see
but to turn on the wiper blades,
catching their crepe paper wings,

sweeping them into a motion not
their own. All of us just trying to get
where we’re going. The butterflies
set on a course toward new blossoms,

petals opened for their eggs.
My own course leading to my grandparents’,
where they open their moss-green door to me,
where I fall into their talcumed embrace.

First published by Mockingheart Review Vol. 3:2 https://mockingheartreview.com/archives/volume-3-issue-2/katherine-lo/

Sister Psalm

While my sister lies on a recliner
3,000 miles away, a cocktail
of destruction dripping
into her bloodstream,
Carlos is showing me a magic trick.

Other students have shown me tricks before,
bad ones, the sleight of hand so obvious
I must feign amazement like a doting mother.
I look at the clock, the stack of papers
on my desk, and watch with weary skepticism
as Carlos shuffles his deck of cards.

It’s a complicated trick.  He holds out
the deck and I pick a card at random.
He has me put it back and shuffle
the deck myself, which I do, that small
mean part of me making it extra thorough.

He fans the deck face up.
“Do you see your card?”
“Yes.”
He divides the deck and fans it again.
“Do you see your card now?”
And so it goes, until I’m not sure
how he will ever find the right one,
though there must be some way
he’s keeping track.  Some formula
to all that dividing and shuffling.

Then he points across the room and says,
“Look in the second book on that shelf.”
I go and look, and there it is, my six of clubs,
buried inside a book on the other side of the room.

I tell him how good he is, and he says
his mother, who goes to church, doesn’t like his tricks.
That they are bad, something of the devil.

I think of all my prayers
for my sister’s healing, how much I want
a miracle, God’s own sleight of hand,

and how it is already here, maybe,
in Carlos’s triumphant face, here
in my startled gasp,
this holy devil reminder
of impossible things
made real.

(first published by CALYX Vol. 30:1 https://www.calyxpress.org/shop/30-1/ )

All Around the Men Are Tumbling

All around the men are tumbling
down like statues after war,
painted idols smashed and crumbling.

Office hallways are now cannons rumbling
with the cold iron fire of lives torn.
All around the men are tumbling.

Titans of industry stumbling,
sleek suits split to the rotten core,
painted idols smashed and crumbling.

They claim it was a bit of bumbling,
a little fun—don’t be such a bore!
All around the men are tumbling,

hanging their heads, mumbling
apologies, bruised egos sore,
painted idols smashed and crumbling.

Who could have seen this humbling
coming, this opening of doors?
All around the men are tumbling,
painted idols smashed and crumbling.

(first published by Poet’s Reading the News:   http://www.poetsreadingthenews.com/2017/12/all-around-the-men-are-tumbling-poetry-katherine-lo/)

Sparrows

We found them after the tree trimmers
had loaded up their machines and gone—
two baby sparrows in the grass, tumbled
like ripe fruit. We placed a shoebox on a heating
pad, lined it with soft cloth, and watched them
squeak and squirm, all purplish crepe skin,
bulging eyes shut. Our mother promised us
she’d feed them when it was time to go to school,
sugar water squeezed from a tiny dropper
into even tinier beaks. I picture her kneeling
over the box every two hours, laboring to save
what could not possibly be saved. Twenty years
later, her pale limbs swollen and still under a light
blue blanket, we too labor, squeezing water
from pink sponges into her slack mouth, more
of it dribbling out than in, love compelling us,
as it does, through the motions of giving life,
as though death had not already made its claim.

Power

True that tenderness never stopped
a bomb, got a man elected
president, or netted billions
in market shares. But when
my father stands in the wedge
between car and car door,
clutching the frame and trembling,
and my brother positions the wheelchair
behind him, grasps him under the arms,
guides him into the nylon seat
for the hundredth time as gently
and unhurried as the first,
I want to bow down.

(first published in Qu Summer 2017 issue:
http://www.qulitmag.com/sparrows/
http://www.qulitmag.com/power/)

dream : logic

Last night I dreamed I was at a party with a house full of people,
and there was only   one     small cake     and a tiny    carton
of ice cream      and I was raging     at the one      responsible
for thinking     that would be     enough      then       (already
it is slipping away)    I was trying     to type           my name
into a computer     to register      for something       and a man
next to me     also typing      kept      erasing it      with his
I was in     an airport terminal      and my dead mother      was
rolling a carry-on     urging me to hurry        so we wouldn’t be
late to meet     my brother      who came out           of another
terminal   rolling a bag amid   a crowd of travelers  rolling bags
and I wonder   what it all    means     if there’s       a lesson:
there should always be enough cake and ice cream for everyone,
and hard as you try to be someone, someone else’s trying might
be stronger, and we will carry a bag with us in heaven and we’ll
find who we’ve been looking for arriving at the next gate.

Fake It

At least go through the motions
of kindness, generosity, love,

working out your prune heart
in reps of ten, then twenty—

whatever makes you feel
the ache of something changing.

Your father peeled an orange
every morning of your childhood,

dropped membraned portions
into your hands, cupped

with readiness. You know how
it is done. Dig with your thumbs,

pierce the pebbled rind.
Peel away the bitter until

the juice below sprays up
and stings the eye.

(first published in The Timberline Review Summer/Fall 2017 issue:
http://timberlinereview.com/)

Barbershop

When my sister’s hair began to fall out,
she was told to go to a barber
as he would be more skilled
than the average stylist
in applying the razor
to her tender scalp, which has always
been covered by hair, even if
just a fine baby down,
but would now be laid bare.

She sits in the chair, surrounded by men,
and explains to the barber three times
that yes, she wants him
to shave it all off.
His English isn’t good.
A man who’s brought his son in
for his first cut translates. “Yes, todos–all.”
My sister points to a photo of a muscled
bald man on the wall.

And so it begins, hair falling
to the floor like soft grass cuttings
to be swept up and thrown away.
A pause after each row
so she can reach for a tissue.
The men in the shop fall silent
and avert their eyes, thinking, maybe,
of their sisters or their wives
as the electric razor whines.

(first published in Poet Lore Fall/Winter 2016; www.poetlore.com )

The Craftsmen

All the shoe repairers and tailors and watch-battery replacers
are little old men with shiny heads bald
except for the rim of white hair circling
the border of where hair used to be,
and ears and noses where hair still sprouts,
weeds growing out of cracks in the sidewalk.

They stand behind their laminate counters with tired shoulders
and peer with mournful eyes at the offering you’ve brought,
turning it in their hands, shaking their heads,
clucking in the back of their throats.

And just as you are teetering off the precipice into
hopelessness, they nod and say, “Come back Thursday”
and quote a price so low
you feel you should talk them higher.

What will happen when all these little old men,
with their secret knowledge brought with them
from another land and learned in another tongue,
go the way of their fathers?

Who will take over their musty strip mall shops,
the same faded shoes and blouses displayed
since the eighties? Who will fill out the little tags
in shaky pencil and know just how to tighten that shoe
strap or hem your pants or maneuver those tiny
tools into the crevice of your watch to pop it open?

Just think of all the broken heels, pants dragging
in the dirt, the watches gone silent and still.

(first published in The Naugatuck River Review Summer/Fall 2016  https://naugatuckriverreview.com/)

Walking with Benen

He is telling you about the turtles, how there were seven of them, no, actually seven frogs, but lots of turtles too, and a large snapping turtle who was this big, and they caught them and held them, but no, they didn’t keep them, they put them back in the water and none of them were hurt and they were really happy, the frogs and the turtles, of which there were many, tons of them, and the urgent joy in his eyes and his motioning hands and the little skipping walk, as if forward is not enough motion but up and down too, and his hoarse bright voice rising, rising above even the generations-old trees with their low swooshing of leaves, because the turtles and frogs, with their legs and beaks and beady eyes, are the whole world, and you want to take this world and tuck it in your pocket and carry it always, like a bright jewel or a stone smoothed by many waters.

(first published in The Lake http://www.thelakepoetry.co.uk/poetry-archive/nov15a/)

What a Poem Is

Both wound and consolation
the wound being truth
the consolation also.
Not truth as a scalpel
cold, precise
but more as a silken net cast wide over the world
and gathered back full
of living things.

Worded desire
or a loss unfurled like a towel shaken out
before you lay it to rest on the sand.

The rope thrown over the edge of the cliff
and the someone on the other end
to pull you up.

The pluck that sets you thrumming.

Little torn off corners of eternity you can stuff
in your pocket.

The old man inching his way through the evening air,
the metallic plink of his walker marking his steady progress.

(first published in The Lake http://www.thelakepoetry.co.uk/poetry-archive/nov15a/)

The Headline Reads Processed Meat Causes Cancer, Says WHO

and again I hear my mother’s voice, Says who?
challenging some claim asserted
by an expert on the radio or the President
in his State of the Union address—Says who?
she would throw back, wearing her flowered apron,
her arms akimbo, the roll in her eye visible
even when we couldn’t see her face.
No authority save God was safe from her
Says who?

Says the World Health Organization, Mom, that’s WHO,
I’d tell her if I could.  If she hadn’t died fourteen years ago
of a cancer no one had heard of, not even the specialists,
even though she disdained processed meat and ate more fruits
and vegetables than anyone I know.  Because whatever we eat
or drink or smoke or think, we’re all going to die someday.
Says who? A little patch of green under an arching tree,
the bronze letters on a plaque spotted with rain.

(first published in Rattle  http://www.rattle.com/poetry/the-headline-reads-processed-meat-causes-cancer-says-who-by-katherine-lo/)