Poetry

The Night Moves

It moves
over tunnels and overpasses
swimming pools
and hospitals It moves

with funnels of clouds
and rains like steam engines
on the parched mouth of suburb
and hooded stars

—over insomniacs
hissing coffee pots
slow march of ticking digits

over voices of exiles
bigots zealots
fortune tellers and sleepwalkers

over silos and refineries
glinting
like fabled palaces

It moves
over the decrepitated town’s
shuttered cinema inn
a nature museum
Over

the narrow road to prison
a utopian farm’s
three-legged barn relics
memories finally ownerless—

The night moves
over us too
ensconced
in the catacomb of sleep
in time’s fidelity

published by Cargo Literary Journal

Pui Ying Wong

Pui Ying Wong was born in Hong Kong. She is the author of 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 won a Pushcart Prize. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Plume Poetry Journal, New Letters, The New York Times and The Southampton Review, among others. She lives in Cambridge MA with her husband, the poet Tim Suermondt.

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