TANGERINE
by Kristina Erny
In Singapore, my sister’s belly grows round as a tangerine. Rice, red bean, cantaloupe, she waits for what’s been planted, waits to feast. Hardest the miles and miles of ocean dark and cold as an iris between us, that sharp pupil of longing, two years scraping the back of my throat dry.
God, I want nothing more than to be able to smell my baby nephew’s neck. Yesterday, my phone lit up with a picture she sent me, taken after lunch at the hawkers. She looked tall and unafraid. Birth any minute, just mere weeks to go, her body ready to be pared. The bowl of the world is the size of the world. I reach out to her from my rim. It’s been too many years since I’ve heard her laugh peel out while the pith piles between us,
inhaling citrus mist,
while all the love hangs there,
getting in my eyes.
Kristina Erny is a third-culture poet and visual artist who grew up in South Korea. She is the author of Elijah Fed by Ravens (Solum Literary Press, 2023), and the chapbook PUT A COMMA IN FRONT OF A PERSON (2024), winner of the Harbor Review Editor’s Prize. She holds an MFA from the University of Arizona and her work won the Tupelo Quarterly Inaugural Poetry Prize and the Ruskin Art Club Poetry Award. Her work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Southern Humanities Review, Blackbird, Yemassee and other journals. She currently lives and works in Shanghai, China.
THE BOWL OF THE WORLD IS THE SIZE OF THE WORLD, 11 x 14 inches, mixed media: watercolor, India ink, graphite, oil pastel, July 2023. Click image to enlarge.