Ryan Wong

Shoreline

How strange & beautiful to find him
face-down in your lap:
foam washed into your arms,

gray hair stuck
to the buckles of your jeans.
How he is all you remember

& less:
a blackened big toe, the ox-
shaped wrinkle on the sag

of his right jowl. A breath,
then two:
a salt-crusted hand grips your shoulder,

nails khaki-yellow & untrimmed digging
into your neck. Syun, he ekes,
froth bubbling from his lips—

the sky within you cleaves.
You knew, once,
that this was another Goodbye:

gruff like the sand the waves can’t ever
reach, the coast a grooved split
between circumstance

& wish.
The mouth: pitted breach
in the brook of passing time,

a pocket of air rusted
as I tell you—
a son stitched in one’s shape 

is only ever a far memory.
How strange & beautiful,
the years strewn about 

like debris:
a seam forming diligently
as a father ebbs & leaves.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Ryan Wong is a Malaysian Chinese writer presently based in Connecticut. Their work appears in fifth wheel press, Impossible Archetype and elsewhere.