Once more will the tiles so welcome friends
or witty guests across the threshold board
for tea and talk and watermelon seeds?
And will the green door in the whitewashed hall
as aptly crack and open as an egg
that’s tapped against a peeling countertop?
The bamboo stools at ebb, will they be set
around the coffee table and the chairs
of polished cypress, delicate but kind?
And what, friend, of the sorghum liquor flask?
Will you nip it from the cabinet shelf
and tuck it somewhere handily nearby?
For then you’ll squat there nattering away
the night with cups of oolong tea and shots
of Kinmen liquor under the autumn moon.
poems have recently appeared in BigCityLit, Alabama Literary Review, The Literary Hatchet, Convivium, The Crank, and Innisfree Poetry Journal, among other places. He lives in Taiwan.
