Dorothy Chan

Sonnet XXII: Mimi’s Newsstand

A cat in Hong Kong is called a “mimi,”
because it’s not “meow, meow,” but “mimi, mimi.”
That’s also the name of Hello Kitty’s twin.
My mother calls out to mimi
while Grandma picks out lychee and longan.
Then it’s time to head to the butcher’s.

I stare at the huge pig’s head at the window,
looking across the street where pigs stop
and stare at the women handing out beer flyers.
The women are wearing tight red dresses,
gesturing to the narrow stairs right above.

I walk to the newsstand next door: girls,
girls girls in the skimpy, on the cover,
wearing white for purity’s sake.

Dorothy Chan’s chapbook, Chinatown Sonnets will be published May 2017 with New Delta Review. She was a 2014 finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship and a 2017 finalist for the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry from Pleiades Press. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Blackbird, Plume, Spillway, Little Patuxent Review, The McNeese Review, and Salt Hill Journal. She is the Assistant Editor of The Southeast Review. Visit her website at dorothypoetry.com or view her chapbook here.