Summer Ended Long Ago

I was the woman going home
after a hard day.

I took the long way
across the soccer field,
no one was playing,
the clouds tasseled.

If there were still good things
in this world
I wanted to feel it in the ground
that holds me up,

catches me when I fall.

In my bag there was a head
of greens, salmon
from an island
buttressed by an old sea.

The sea said nothing. Nor could I.

Pui Ying Wong’s new collection of poetry The Feast is forthcoming from MadHat Press in 2021. She has written 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 received a Pushcart Prize. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Plume Poetry, New Letters, Zone 3 and The New York Times, among others. Born and raised in Hong Kong, she now lives in Cambridge Massachusetts with her husband, the poet Tim Suermondt.