by Grace Kwan

The quartered orange’s
soft body, sipped
from its rind
into a mouth
capable of saying
such permanent things as:
“They dug up a dog
that was buried
32,000 years ago
with a mammoth bone in
his mouth.”
Shells outlast the mollusc
by thousands of years.
Form growth lines
where the soft animal inside
didn’t have enough to eat.
Wolves came searching
for scraps but renounced scrutability.
I don’t know what I’ll do
without Vancouver’s beauty—
it’ll slip off my body
like water and disappear
into hard soil
into the open mouth of a mountain
named for a dog.

Grace Kwan is a writer and graduate student researching the creative, intellectual, and artistic labour of Asian immigrants in Vancouver, BC. Alongside a debut poetry chapbook published with Bottlecap Press (2021), their prose and poetry have appeared in The Capilano Review, Plainsongs, and Canthius, among others. Find them @sleepyfacegrace on Instagram and Twitter or at grckwn.com.