Enter the Chrysanthemum Poems	Intimate Distances Poems	Double Lives Anthology of Essays

Camouflage

outside, pacing fury:
a plywood door
prepares to buckle.

inside, a legless bed floats
docked against a wall,

medusas in the wallpaper’s
clumped foliage peer
into an empty shag sea.

a narrow closet,
innards jumbled–
woolly hems, boots and
a twelve-year-old.

her crouched silence.
she pretends to be
a shoe.

(from Intimate Distances (Nightwood Editions, 2002), earlier published in A Room at the Heart of Things (Vehicule, 1998), and in Swallowing Clouds: An Anthology of Chinese-Canadian Poetry (Arsenal Pulp Press, 1999), and selected for B.C’s Poetry in Transit Program in 2002, Copyright © 1998 by Fiona Tinwei Lam )