Dear citizen, dear continent of care,

The heart of the forest takes no prisoners.
Its iris clouds. The book uncertain, spell

to which we keep returning, its spider-raiment,
clammy in the cheek, bright aurum at the breast.

All of us enter with eyes bound. Some of us will
emerge, blinking in the silky gray sun, faint taste

of iron worrying our tongues. Some of us, too,
must stay. Who can say what keeps us here—

the enchantment too thick, our bodies too burdened
with sawdust and stone. Spin us a ditty. A capsule,

a basket of razor-tipped rhymes. Let the line pierce
the redwoods, gather up hard bark and cinder,

salve for a sentence too thick to swallow. How
the notes of the coda eat themselves, rouse the mice

from mouths of their holes. The lone stag still trapped
in the bushes, heaving. Sing us a hymn for the ones left behind.

fragment

what pieces of the rufous
feathered self. if you ask. which
question of the body. think:
jeanette isabella. white room.
pinked night. the torch brought.
no baby. the forest’s burled shutter. opens
to hinged moon. in the undergrowth, glazed
sedge. sugared mouth. no birds. no
song. a darkly chromatic tune. yes,
sinew. another think: pieces of story.
the room on shuffle. pile of spent
drains and needles. all tentacles
coming to. womb hanging a sickle. milk
stump. your mystery of faith. of movement.
will we. the one thing: rose window of a word.
what it means to retrieve it. womanhood,
if bodied. yarn overs. controlled slip.
catechised needle nip. a visible
mend. the lip stitched over. wraiths for
hands. piped carol. you a blank december.
singed from the inside. fresh coal. but you.
the surface scrambled. only fuzz. if nacre. pearl,
partridge shape. well, waking. who will
write. unreach. the robin-throated tree.

A Story About Trees in Winter

My country is locked in deep freeze, streets smothered by turrets of snow, power lines sunk, encased in necklaces of fortified glass. My loved ones in three states brace for disaster, filling the bathtubs, filling the generator, dripping the faucets, buying up choy sum and rice.

Keep them safe. The prayer a talisman I worry like a pebble—but how can I know? What is safe when each week, we number another among the dead? And that little boy, wide-eyed, lost in the salt rime and subzero haze? The hundred clergy hauled from the concrete where they knelt, prayers breaking softly over the curls of their breath? Amazing grace—what sound must it make for a heart to remove itself? Last night, I could feel mine trying, hot as embers, shivering through the soles of my feet.

The page asks: What is the grammar of atrocity? What does failure feel like in the body? Ice behind the temples; a cold stone expanse; old bones suspended for all to see; the lake seized clear through to the bottom. I cannot concentrate on poetry. My mind pings off each image, dull to the words’ slow music. I move through soup. I drag my heart to work, my body to the phone, to the next walk, the next glass of ferric water.

Someone tells me a story about winter. When they were a child, they learned to stay clear of the forest: When bitter enough, a tree’s blood stills to stone. Crystal chafes cambium, pushes its bounds in the night, explodes.

Woman in the Philadelphia Airport

I am angered by her anger;
the words she lobs like grenades—at the agent,

who does not control the fog, the manifest,
the connection, the purple of the rainclouds

peeling up from above the crimson-cast
tarmac. The pitch of her screams unravels

the drowsy morning whirr of electric trollies,
roller bags bumping along on linoelum floors.

I want to tell her, stop this, and lady,
we’ll all get there, but today, I’m stopped

by the salt brimming up in the back of my own throat,
recalling my mother alone in the driveway, the dark

of the house’s shell after the funeral guests
had gone. Who knows what ache we each hold

in the closets of our chests—this woman,
soiling the counter with spit and tears, the agent,

whose eyes cloud the color of the storm,
and me, with the fist in my throat, the surprise

of the shine on my cheeks as the sun fills
the terminal with ruby-bright dawn?

*

Iris A. Law is the author of Periodicity (Finishing Line, 2013). Her work has been published in journals such as The New England Review, The Georgia Review, and The Offing, and has most recently been anthologized in The Nature of Our Times: Poets on America’s Lands, Waters, Wildife, and Other Natural Wonders (Paloma, 2025) and They Rise Like A Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Women Poets (Blue Oak, 2022). From 2009 through 2022, Iris served as cofounding editor of Lantern Review: A Journal of Asian American Poetry.