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Issue 12: | March 2022 |
Cherita Sequence: | 152 words |
(Saigon, 1975)
I want to memorize your face, let it sink into my body like rain seeps into earth. Your roots cannot survive this soil; how can I explain? ~ The heart that used to pump my blood goes with you— please accept so small a gift. How will the longan tree bear fruit? Sweet food has lost its taste, monsoon mocks my weeping. ~ Rice fields keep me busy, my hands find much to do. Lemongrass and fish sauce have found some flavor; memory lights a candle where my heart was. ~ Behind the leaves of dragon’s eye, sometimes I think I see... In mangoes as they ripen, in clouds that form and disappear, in a corner, by the candle: my questions: ~ Is that soil good for you? Your roots grown deep, your branches green and filled with laughing? Do you hear the leafbird’s many calls, know that I have not forgotten?
is a poet, a licensed marriage and family therapist, and the editor of Spirit Fire Review. Her poetry is found in Nostos, Unlost Journal, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Clamor 2021, Black Bough’s Christmas & Winter Edition, and in several anthologies. Cindy lives in Southern California with her husband and their children.
⚡ Gunnysack, cherita sequence by Cindy Bousquet Harris, a semi-finalist in MacQ’s Magician Ekphrastic Writing Challenge (Issue 3, May 2020)
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