Rock Island Border Crossing — The Penn Review

There was a rock store on our last drive
away from Montreal, near Derby Line’s curve
of evergreen, picket-fencing the horizon.
The road ahead, a promise of fluorescent foodmarts
and Disneyland’s nightly fireworks, yet
the first thing past the border: a lonely shack
caked in the mining dust of a ghost city, choked
in the open throat of early noon, sun enough
to announce dried rain on window-glass, death
in cricket cages. In that store, I watched my dad
gift pebbles of soot painted feldspar and pyrite
to my sister. Spinning each stone to the light
like there was something living beneath the skin
of caked dust. Each of them seemed to me
plucked like the eyes of giants, lifeless with grief.
I couldn’t understand what beauty she found
in the cut edges of processed stone, why she saved
every pebble from nowhere Vermont to our yard
in Changsha, prim like china dolls in the glass
display case of our living room. On the 87
into America I kept being told to look out
the window, but I was too focused on bison
jerky, the kind you can only get on road trip
gas stations. How I saw real bison last month
in Yukon, running headlong into the meadow
glare. I only lifted my head to place against
the glass when we entered the city center’s
roundabout, because I thought I saw the crown
of the Disney castle, cold white in the city’s
slumber. Yes, my mom said, we’ll go. No one
said anything about the curls of paint scaling
the Disney tower when we drove near, the disused
church light surgical in darkness. A man sitting silent,
wringing his hands on the sinking wood steps.
The first night in our new house, I pressed my face
to every fogged window, listening
still for the burst of fireworks like the split
center of agate stone, resting on my father’s desk.

Mimi Yang currently resides in Shanghai, but they have lived in Boston and Montreal. Their work has been recognized by the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers and the UK Poetry Society, and appears or is forthcoming in The Margins, Palette Poetry, Rust & Moth, and elsewhere.