Sean Wang
The Stitch, Poetry
Strawberry tips bead the knuckles,
a seed nicks skin; damp pools
on the board, bright as foil.
After the hospice van left with my grandmother, the kitchen
kept working. I drag the day
out of the drawer, receipts curled.
​
A pale spool rolls,
its notch bites wood. In the linen stack you squared,
the hems keep initials, rushed;
thread tensions argue at the margin,
a blind stitch catches.
I tried to carry you prickle-in,
tea-towels between us. That failed.
Pins found the soft parts anyway.
Hospice left a sheen on the bedrail,
the call light blinked without hurry,
the plastic jug filmed at the bottom.
Your hair rose wrong with static;
wind worried the puttied sash,
loosening it along the frame.
At home, your hum returns as steam.
The pot ticks; the shawl keeps
last winter’s shampoo in its crease.
The stove light strips my coat,
works at it like a label that will not quit.
By evening my fingers find it,
right where the lining turns back,
one hooked stitch refusing to lie flat.
Apricot Seam with White Gauze, Poetry
At the sink the mouth is quiet.
Before the day starts, I angle a pharmacy pick
under the mirror light, tongue steady, speech low.
Along the seam I work the metal,
seed-sweet water beads at the gum.
What I’ve been circling firms in the throat.
Ask nothing. Test the edge.
Old wreck lifts, a flake of years,
rides the ledge of my lower teeth.
A slip, a bright chip talks between molars,
quick glass; I spit, taste pit and sugar,
rinse the sore strip clean.
Better to pry where the years nest,
to say what breaks as I break it,
to leave the tract in one piece.
The chart waits, squares of proof and guess.
I swab, and what I meant
clicks free, small and stony.
Into gauze with it. The cloth rises,
blotting a little heat that warms, then thins.
I lift it once, still wet,
set it down. A little air moves the cloth,
just so.
Stall, Prose
I fold into the stall.
Walls give up soap film, last night’s heat
from the pale rectangle where the tub once sat,
tiles still slick at the edges, grout leaves
a faint ring around the absence.
As a child I cupped my left ear as told,
knees blued on porcelain, slow turning,
palms on the rim to steady the spin.
My mother came, towel wrung tight,
jaw set, lips beginning to loosen.
She leaned to my ear with a knuckle,
tapped till the pressure jumped,
the door latch clicked, the mirror flashed white,
then air rushed in on one count, not two.
Years later the stall is narrower,
linen-thin walls, cold needles on my forearms.
No fog. Only her palm, imagined, on the frost,
searching where my shoulder brightens the glass,
same hand, almost the same height.
I stand. Water beads around my feet.
A soap shard skates, noses the drain,
stalls at the grate, then drifts back,
small bar of work, circling in place.
Traveller from Deep Space, Prose
First time I saw him, it was cold rain season.
He lay naked on his stomach in a small white boat,
water gathered in the curve of his back,
the shore clogged with reeds and rusted cans,
as if a tilted ring of ice far off
had dropped one grain of light into this river.
I checked the rope that tied him to the rotten post.
He said he came from nothing
and pushed the skiff back into blank water.
Next time, noon burned through a thinning cloud.
His hair was brushed, his shirt clean,
a woman beside him on the bench of the skiff,
four slack bodies between them and the gunwale,
eyes filmed, ribs sharp as winter branches,
flies circling slow above their open mouths.
I asked again. He spoke of hunger reaching out,
of meals that hid the bones of what was taken.
I stepped aside and he moved them past me, downriver.
Last time, dawn was clear and thin above the river.
His jacket was torn, his trousers soaked,
one oar split and hanging from the metal lock.
He looked smaller, a traveller from deep space, a dim star
at the ragged edge of an expanding sky.
He said the world I pointed to on the bank
had already thinned behind him,
closing like a wake over its own channel.
He said he was sliding into erasure,
like the groove of the rope on the post
once the water rose to cover it,
ready to step around my questions on that narrow deck
and meet frost on the metal, the thin air
above the river.
Some evenings all three versions lift at once,
stacked along the seam where water darkens into sky:
the body in rain, the pressed cloth, the woman and the dead,
the figure with the broken oar inside raw light.
They turn together like fragments that miss the ground,
like a small stone loosened and refusing its fall.
Everything narrows to one clear bubble on the surface,
a small globe of colour, reeds and rust and sky
caught for a second between loss and a shore uncharted,
until it bursts and the river folds the light under, goes on.
Bio: Sean Wang is a Pushcart Prize nominated poet and PhD student. His poems appear or are forthcoming in West Trade Review, ONE ART, Wild Roof Journal, Stone Poetry Quarterly, and O:JA&L, where his work was selected for the Broadside Series, among others. He can be found on Instagram at @sean_wang1997.