Fur Coat

By Cynthia Hua

To my younger self, how wrong you were then
to mistake your hours for waiting,
suspicious the days were only hand motions, shopping bags,
crisp packets of stars and Merino wool, imported from Italy
but resting by your doorway by the tall boots, waiting

for pronouncements of rain, morning static and phone alerts,

the nights a dyed blue cloth, cut with rosemary spritzers
in turns at a card game,

and wrong to think
your dalliances of the heart
were thesaurus entries

under ceiling lamps, one another’s
blind spots emphasized by highlighter.

Nothing in this world is nothing.

Where you pick up the phone, where you play Etta James, where you stand for photographs —
is a fur coat. The dead know what nothing is, that grief
will enter unannounced and make its soundlessness known.

For now, your days are mulberry branches,
housing their sticky gray families of fruit,

their caterpillars and the passage of time,
silvery sap in stalagmites, fleshy and panicked.
Where you can hear it, the noise means everything,

every front page of The New York Times,
the usage of serif fonts
to indicate detail, attention to

subtle aberrances in happiness. Quick,

before you are unfortunate or struck
by the shape of lightning and black ties     a skylight
or tunnel so dim and voiceless it haunts the dying, hail a cab,

let it all in, everyone in the cheap apartment,

anybody who will pick up, call, take as many pictures
as you can of family, whatever family

you would gather while it’s still August, you’re still

piled on the stoop with the pigeons and Carlos Rivera

is crooning to you and out of every barbershop.

Wandering a world
so full you feel lost

is everything.

“Fur Coat” by Cynthia Hua is a Poetry Finalist in Columbia Journal’s 2019 Spring Contest, judged by Tommy Pico.

About the author:

Cynthia X. Hua is a poet and artist. She was previously a Finalist for the Norman Mailer Awards in Poetry, and a fellow with Brooklyn Poets. She has been published in Boulevard, Glass Poetry and Carbon Culture.