Cynthia Atkins
Summer 2025 | Poetry
Poem With No Ending
The stars offer no answers, so I go about
my business, as if a cheap tourist in a flea market.
Through the windshield, only fog,
I searched for the finish line, but every blurry
edge looks like a deep fake. Now all is false
information—What came first, the rooster, the egg
or the imposter? Up is down, down is up.
I go to the sunset at day’s end, but tomorrow is filled
with groceries, oddities, quarrels put to bed
with a gentle touch under lamplight. Breath is light,
but living is cumbersome. I yearn not to stop
at traffic lights. The prairie shivers in December
like humans swaying in the grandstands. This is half-time.
But I remember being exiled from the pretend of childhood.
It was abrupt, no going back. So, I consume the landscape,
keep driving, while grief looks for a homeland.
Shui-yin Sharon Yam is a diasporic HongKonger living in Lexington, Kentucky. She is Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies at the University of Kentucky. She is the author of two books-Inconvenient Strangers: Transnational Subjects and the Politics of Citizenship and more recently, Doing Gender Justice: Queering Reproduction, Kin, and Care (co-authored with Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz). Her public scholarship has been published in the New York Times, Foreign Policy, and Hong Kong Free Press, among others.