ISSUE 2
M. Cynthia Cheung
The Sand-People of Sutton Hoo
Adjacent to the royal barrows,
archeologists find another burial ground.
Each grave opened is a squared off pit
where the dead seem idle,
or interrupted. For instance,
that one, his skull—separate
from his neck—grins
between his knees. Here, a woman
appears the way I might look
if I laid down quietly
and died. If a warm hand
then pressed closed my eyes
and wiped everything else away.
To be forgiven.
I lean in for a closer inspection.
No, her head is also unlatched,
carefully turned
facedown, facing hell.
Terminus
After the thaw, I come across a twisted
sinew in the grass. Silently, sun rips
open the muck, cracks the remains
into strange letters. And what
should I read in them?
Nothing seems familiar this spring.
I find my way down the roadside ditches,
to the slack water where whole
petty kingdoms once scabbed the shore. And there,
when the moon opens its cold eye,
I find the river god who has died
a thousand times. His voice scrapes
along the edge: I believe in my
abandonment…it is what I have.¹
My reflection drains; his shadow
lifts itself from the ground. I can still see
the small shred of pelt—gray-brown, anonymous—
rippling as if under another god’s hand.
¹from Geoffrey Hill’s “Funeral Music”
M. Cynthia Cheung is a physician whose poems can be found in The Baltimore Review, Four Way Review, Pleiades, RHINO, swamp pink, SWWIM Everyday, Tupelo Quarterly and others. She is the recipient of an Idyllwild Arts Writers Week fellowship, and was a finalist in the Sunken Garden Chapbook Poetry Prize and the Snowbound Chapbook Award, both from Tupelo Press, as well as finalist and semi-finalist in the Two Sylvias Chapbook Prize and the Black River Chapbook Competition from Black Lawrence Press, respectively. She serves as a judge for Baylor College of Medicine’s annual Michael E. DeBakey Medical Student Poetry Awards. www.mcynthiacheung.com