Consider your arteries. How they are
tangled like panicles in the wind. How blood
beats through them the way water beats
through rice. Threaded with what little
you know about grain-growing. If you could open them up,
you would find them stocked like silos
or somersaulting with the fullness of summer.
Sticking to the walls against which they strain.
You are conscious of your carelessness
with the rice. You have not looked after each grain
with equal dignity. You are little more
than a straggler. Stumbling. Lifted by this fluid
of seeds turned thick in the listless rain.
–
Maggie Wang is interested in intertextuality, the environment, and the absurd. She is the author of a chapbook, The Sun on the Tip of a Snail’s Shell (Hazel Press, 2022).