Three Poems

by Aiden Heung


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​Reckoning

Sometimes you forget how fragile your body is,
so you scratch your skin until it bleeds.
A strange joy to feel the itch turning to pain.

Hell could be beautiful
if you let it, like rotten meat
still attracting flies, roaches, wolves.
Hunger, not love--the honesty of it all.

What use of the skin if you want
to break out of your body. There must be
something after the emptiness of the ache.

So you sit and wait for the world to come
with its teeth. Only your blood
ticks louder--a battleground
of what hurts and what still wants.

You press your finger to the pulse--
to be certain there’s something left
to take: something that still holds.

Silence reigns like a cathedral
you want to vanish into, daring to be made.
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Nothing around you but stones.



Under Blue

The bone structure of a done house.
Daylight bites. A stone
angel gone. Dusted staircase
lounges into shrubs. I steal

a few words from sprawling graffiti
and squeeze,
as if from a rubber duck,
a sound to match the meaning.

Pronged paths, each watched
by a fat lamp. Gravels squeal.
Grass where they shouldn’t be.
Spasms of violets in violent air.
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And then in Creve Coeur
I see my body pinned to its shadow.



Tree of Heaven 

You walk down a street
shaded by trees considered
invasive. You admire the foliage,
how easily, gracefully,
their green has slipped
into summer’s brocade--
Every spring, there are people
who cut them down.
They hate the flowers, say they stink
of fish, claim they don’t belong,
but you see the branches sway
in the same wind
that touched all the lilacs in the garden.
You wonder if these trees know--or care--
what it is to live
in a place that insists
they shouldn’t.
Still, they bloom.
And so, perhaps, will you.


Aiden Heung is a poet and former chemical salesman who is obsessed with squash, the sport, not the vegetable.