It is November.
I am mining crystal geodes
from the dead
dendrites in my head,
working up a full-body
sweat. What I find,
I swallow. What I swallow,
I feed. I am insidious.
I get heavy
scabrous stones
to believe
in inner beauty.
What more
is there to do? Watch
them settle like change
in a fountain just right
of my spleen?
Celebrate the brilliant
blackness of bellies?
I should add that
it’s a Saturday.
Even the sweet-potato
peddler is still
curled around his wife,
smelling of gold
and trying to eat it.
It’s none of my business
so I don’t tell him,
Your wife prefers you
hungry. I don’t say,
Can’t you see,
in the light
she can’t find
pretty anymore? I’m not
the one lying
with a stomach
full of rocks, waiting
for clairvoyance.
I’m the one
with a stomach
full of nerves, whistling
at the ground.
About The Author
Elizabeth T. Chao
Elizabeth T. Chao received her BA in Comparative Literature from the University of California at Berkeley and holds nursing degrees from Johns Hopkins University and the University of California at San Francisco’s School of Nursing. She worked for several years as an oncology nurse in California before moving to Texas where she earned an MFA in Poetry from the James A. Michener Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Narrative, Rattle, The Journal, Juked, and elsewhere.
Fairy tales were woven into my childhood tapestry from the very first stitch. My grandmother and mother seemed to have a story to accompany every event in my life. Not sleepy? Here’s a tale about the Tiger Lady who fried little fingers in vats of hot oil and munched on them while children slept. Refuse to take off your new shoes? Here’s the tale of a pair of red shoes. The lines between reality and fantasy were perforated for much of my youth and now in most of my poems. It’s exciting as a writer to see where one will take the other, and vice versa. This discovery of how old tales can grow new and wild is what brings me back to the page again and again.
