M Cynthia Cheung

Forms of Water

A friend tells me if I were desperate enough, I wouldn’t settle
for any of this—wave of the hand. Perhaps she means
the middle-aged sagging of my core, where I once believed
I needed to sweat. Or maybe that I ought to act
more grateful. That I don’t have, for example, cancer,
and can do whatever people
without cancer do. 

Reading the headlines to my girls: Siberia has melted,
and a graveyard of long-dead reindeer is spewing anthrax.
Havana Syndrome isn’t new; during the Cold War,
“Operation Hello” used microwaves to make people think
they were hearing voices. How can you hear
something that doesn’t exist? 

I take my mom to her appointment. We forget
her glucometer, and the doctor reminds us
about diet and exercise. I take myself
to the grocery store—black plums are in season.
Dad and the girls like them. They take the stones
and hope for seedlings. But I feel cold 

remembering January, when the ditches sank
under the weight of rain, and people
sank under the weight of their lungs. I cannot
forget my grandmother’s eyes in the monochrome
photos, when she was still a medical student and didn’t know
that in seventy years, in the bed she’d never
leave again, she’d ask me
when she could go. 

The trees on our street haven’t recovered
from the winter freeze. It’s possible
they won’t.

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M Cynthia Cheung is a physician whose writing can be found in The Baltimore Review, RHINO, Salamander, SWWIM, Tupelo Quarterly and others. Currently, she serves as a judge for Baylor College of Medicine’s annual Michael E. DeBakey Medical Student Poetry Awards. Find out more at www.mcynthiacheung.com.