include embossed nonchalance
include measures of breath
rising, daintily, from the soft
soft curves of a glass
bowl, its lipline
hesitant, jade tinkling.
I don’t know whether my
neighbors, too, listen
suspended
by such song, the accordion
player across the street
sings staccato, globe-
glissando drafting through
windows of myself in view:
a prayer from the arteries
of the city, walls shadowed and
smooth where she bellows in a suit.
I trail her hands’ flight over
a sea of keys,
pulling in and out the psalm
of that fluted lung. It drifts
above us running the streets
across hat stalls & newspaper stands
and I’m amazed at the many ways
her fingers dance, both across
and in time with the specifics
of breathing—an accordion, an
ocean. Somewhere across the Pacific,
two women begin to sing, spinning
like old boats. I long to listen;
how the lotuses, a mother
and daughter, would soak
with dew till their petals tipped
into each other, pouring rain
into water—music so slow, so soft,
and soaked too soon.
Isabelle Wei is a Korean-Chinese writer, journalist, and poet.
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