On Pike Street

SUE KWOCK KIM

ON PIKE STREET

For Isaac

Slicing a mango to share between us, your mother

smiles at the grinning idiot I've become, plies me

again with wine. You are not here, working late.

Spiced plantains heaving in oil, the smell of beans

rising in generous shawls of steam: the grounds of trust

are as nourishing as this, it seems, and as fragile-

intricate bridges of breath, bare warmth, and time.

When she takes my face into her hands as if she would

pare open a fruit, her ravaged voice searing through me,

I see her as she must have been once, in all her raw

unsparing beauty-long before she fell

in love with your father, a man who shattered

what he touched, who left her eyes galled by all the

other

faces, like yours, she might have looked into with love.