Maggie Yang
Summer 2023 | Poetry
Faceless Currency
You stare at your face on the green card
more wrinkled than your hands, name peeling off
into the edges of an American frame, speckled with stars &
surrounded by picket fences. The bus window blurs your eyes
as you sit on the plastic seat, more warmth
outside than in your hands, as you fumble over
a coin, unaccepted currency.
The map on the wall of the bus
is turned horizontal, the city squashed into a line
where each destination lights up as the wheels screech
except the light is broken, constantly flashing
at an avenue you long left. The man sitting across from you
devours a beer bottle with his eyes and the woman beside
you eyes a poster plastering the ceiling, the color of immigration
eroded on your face. Your hands become a stranger
a preservation of your memories. The first time
you sat on your own seat in transportation, you had only
a clothbound bag of illiterate lifelines, surrounding this plasticized
world, dichotomies like boundary lines drawn with a wall
colored in shapes. A crumpled flyer under your feet
as you pick up the wet poster and see your reflection in the mud.
Maggie Yang is a writer and artist from Vancouver, Canada. Her poetry has been recognized by the Poetry Society, The League of Canadian Poets, and Poetry in Voice, and appears or is forthcoming in Subnivean, Eunoia Review, F(r)iction Lit, among others. Her art appears in The Adroit Journal. An interdisciplinary artist, she is particularly intrigued by the intersections of the written word with the visual and performing arts.