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Pui Ying Wong was born in Hong Kong. She is the author of a full length book of poetry Yellow Plum Season (New York Quarterly Books, 2010), two chapbooks: Mementos (Finishing Line Press, 2007), Sonnet for a New Country (Pudding House Press, 2008) and her poems have appeared in Angle Poetry (U.K.), The Brooklyner, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal (Hong Kong), Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, Crannog (Ireland), Desde Hong Kong: poets in conversation with Octavio Paz, Chameleon Press (Hong Kong), Pirene’s Fountain, Prairie Schooner, The Southampton Review and 2Bridges Review, among others. She lives in Cambridge, MA with her husband.  She recently won the Pushcart Prize for her poetry and is a member of the Somerville Bagel Bards.

Pui Ying Wong.

HOTEL MUNCHNER KINDL

The hostess has on a Staten Island shirt

and is not talkative

but says she likes New York.

The house breakfast serves

fresh farm eggs, lingonberry jam,

Tropicana juice if we want American.

Lace and velvet and a wingback chair,

the wall in our room a virgin green

out of the Black Forest.

My husband is in love with

the Bavarian beauty in the painting,

busty, slim-waist in a dirndl.

Octoberfest, a platoon of carriages

winds up and down Tor Sendlinger.

Flushed faces in the crowd, misted

from sleep, from longings. Horses

hold their head high, the cobbled streets

weep all afternoon the sound of their hooves.

— Pui Ying Wong

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