M. Cynthia Cheung
Portal
Vein of quartz interrupts the light.
The forest, beyond currents marled
by broken boats, thrums
with the slippage of leaves:
small lacerations made by
passing wings. A smashed chandelier
corrodes among the morels, incidental
to the scene as if dropped
by accident. Man’s shame arrived
so late, incandescent in the moment
before flight. The world’s forests
matured on a diet of flames.
Rivers plunge underground in summers,
stream through cities of roots.
M. Cynthia Cheung is the author of Common Disaster (Acre Books). Her poems can be found or are forthcoming in AGNI, Gulf Coast, The Massachusetts Review, Oxford Poetry, Pleiades, and swamp pink, among others, and she is the recipient of the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America. She practices internal medicine in Texas.