Three Poems
Granada
Here, a thin silk canopy,
avenues where orange blossoms bruise
under sun. We sit in the courtyard, distant
mountains gleaming behind your wasted face.
How long since your tongue could taste
iron in meltwater, your fingers deft
enough to pluck a pomegranate seed
without bursting? What I imagine
is vanishing—language
you will take beyond the peaks.
I should not blame silence
on the dead—nor ruin of pleasure—
but who else to blame?
For all the pain in this world, you say,
I love this life. Light traverses
your face, translucent.
We hold stillness in our hands, listen
to fountains speak.
The Adversary
after Agha Shahid Ali
I track a scorpion—deathstalker—in the heat-ridden night.
It spins venom only at night.
You play innocence so well, with such precision. No need to hide
your thoughts—your selves await in amethyst nights.
Variable Antares—two stars circling—redder, profound.
Are they Greek? Arabic? No one knows but angels of night.
An angel is a trick of light, a sting: beautiful as it falls.
Like Satan, I too will finesse the angels all through the night.
Each venom bites its own way. Would you rather scyllatoxin
or Charybdis’? Both claim they’re besotted by night.
Defenseless as a demi-god, my grief drags a wing
over our eyes. You say it’s just illusion: our nights
of sweat, reckless blood. Still, our heartbeats flash
in synchrony through fluorescent nights.
It’s only pain. My dreams practice small deaths, find
their own black holes. O this electric and eternal night—
Babur Longs for Kabul
Sing again of the first time I lit upon him, his voice in the city’s afternoon market, and he, sensing my gaze, turned. How he suffered me to contemplate him, already Beloved! He made no secret that he despised my bashfulness. Not even ointments applied to my body diminished the pain. On holy days, in the manner of the afflicted, I carried fresh melons and plums and in tiny plazas, waited for slivers of heat to fade. Alone, I would hear his approach, eager, his hand sudden against my back. How many times can one flee a homeland? Breath of lotus makes me weep. Fountains, smashed. What return? We cannot return. Solstice to year’s end, daybreak existed for his glancing away.
spoilt calligraphy
unstoppered glass clouds
overtake song
M. Cynthia Cheung is the author of Common Disaster (Acre Books, 2025). Her poems can be found in AGNI, Gulf Coast, The Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, and swamp pink, among others. She is the recipient of the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America. She practices internal medicine in Texas.
