Laura Wang

Callery Pears
 
I knew them as impostor cherry blossoms:
the same five petals crowned with an anemone 
of filaments, the same magenta in the belly, 
the same mid-April bloom in clusters
fat as lollipops. 
                  The same worry, too, 
that the next rain would beat them off, 
leaving branches January-bare
and streets flecked with soggy confetti.
The only difference was that these were white, 
and once you came to get a closer look
they’d pierce you with a stench like — what? 

Like sawdust, shrimp shells, trimmings of beefsteak, 
like semen, sweetened dumpster juice, the stalls
of middle school girls’ bathrooms when we went 
through that appalling week once called 
the time of flowers, the worst part
of what the counselors called our blossoming: 

breast buds, braces, cheek blooms, acne bursts, 
sprouting hair-down-there that we despised, 
strawberry shave gel masking onion sweat, 
cactus calves and rounding thighs. 
Shoved suddenly down beauty’s slide
we scraped our knees. When the bell rang
we filled the classrooms with the scents
of melon hairspray and deodorant,
hoping the right boy would hover near,
buzz clumsy love-words, graze our shoulders, 
the memory of our touch sticking to him
like pollen. 
             In time we learned much more: 
as we passed through a putrid grove of them 
in Central Park, a tipsy girl wondered aloud, 
What’s that smell? It smells familiar,
and we all laughed, complicit in knowing 

that the Callery pear’s the only honest thing
on the streets — smelling exactly like its business, 
the same business as everything else
in the middle of April, fetid petals splayed
with a frankness that leaves us stunned,
and gasping, and already drawn in. 


Hawaii Real Estate

Everybody living in these islands knows 
square footage is even harder than cash 
to come by, and whatever you don’t use 
to make your home becomes the home 
of something else: after the bankruptcy, 
the liquidation that yanks even the lights 
out from the ceilings like gold teeth,
the store only appears to be vacant — 
un-board the windows, and the squatters 
soon scatter on innumerable feet.

Today, clearing a too-long-untouched shelf
in the hallway closet, gingerly I lifted out
a musty set of linens and shook loose
the eggs of some unidentifiable vermin,
now strewn across the ash veneer like pebbles 
on a vast volcanic shore. Trashing the sheets 
stained beyond the work of any cleansing Tide, 
I scrubbed the board and Dysoned the casings 
from the floor, cursing the creatures with which 
I’d shared space and the most basic hopes:

to find someplace warm and livable,
not prone to upheaval; to sleep and breed 
between soft sheets; to produce some unerasable 
undeniable trace of myself, before being taken up 
into the great Vacuum that none escapes.

Laura Wang is a high school English teacher in Honolulu, Hawaii, the city where she grew up. Some of her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Christian Century, The Windhover, and Bamboo Ridge. Originally trained as a medievalist, she has also published scholarship on Chaucer and on the fifteenth-century Scottish poet Robert Henryson.