"I Once Thought All Sunsets Were Over Water" by Shelley Wong
I Once Thought All Sunsets Were Over Water
Another life in the Bay & still I fall for that sunshine ice wind. Wind that floods my silk skirt as I whisper eucalyptus, my imagined safeword. I’m a tan fourth-generation Californian wearing socks in July. I want Chinese grandmothers to pick the peaches sweet enough to eat. When the cashier calls me miss, I’m flattered, but also I have earned my ma’am respect. Old enough & I sing of BTS — praise the one wearing a shirt splashed with Dorothy asleep in a Technicolor field, the poppies overbright like lanterns. Over a hundred years ago, my great-grandfathers refused to die as bachelors. They found wives in Chinatown mission rescue homes or brought them back from China, sailing on the ocean’s indifference before interrogation at Angel Island. As a living miracle: I float, curving through a church on rollerskates, disco-lit. I flirt & flee in ecstatic florals across this earthquake land. Maybe I’m the foolish future, ignoring swipe right notifications across the gender spectrum in another faded summer of free love, wandering through the fog of lost parachuters, fog of abandon, fog of broken spells— Originally published in Wildsam San Francisco travel guide
Audio: Shelley Wong reads “I Once Thought All Sunsets Were Over Water”
Shelley Wong is a poet and the author of As She Appears (2022), longlisted for the National Book Award and winner of a Lambda Literary Award. She lives in San Francisco.
Book: As She Appears