M. Cynthia Cheung

Kalends

It’s been a year since the air 
retreated and everything arrived late—
winter, the rain. Breath. 

A friend once said to me, Everyone is afraid
of dying. I remember my grandmother waiting
to die, and when she opened her mouth 
at the end, the sounds were already gone.

Across the city, newborn mountains
push into the sky. When I leave the hospital at the end 
of my shift, glaciers over the peaks 
glitter like minor galaxies. 

Ghost 

In the years when mesquites pull water
hard enough, whole rivers disappear 
underground. I am posthumous beneath 
the sun, watching fossil beds offer up 
their braille of naked limestone. Where the cliff 
mouths what remains of my slow drip, my 
stain of wet rust, I return to the place where 
I fell. The things I did to stop myself 
from thinking. I need so little breath now 
that I’ve left my body. How familiar the silence 
drawing the margins of an hour, sifting 
the drift of my sediment—

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