WILDERNESS

Formerly wandering as it pleased,
Lop Nor—once-upon-a-time oasis—
is now salt. Horses could sink
to their knees on these banks.

I sink to my knees, pressed by the sky’s
dim cities. This is the wilderness that inhabits
my mind—a thing that shifted course
and grew in its own desolation.

Here, the nor’s concentric shores
circle each other: dried rims
of rusted green. My thoughts circle
like dying stars. I bleed into

this world, shadow people
who disappear like rivers.
In the corner of the map, Lucifer
(am I disappeared?) is painted on his desert

kingdom, and there, my forebears’
strange legacy: the end
of the earth ticking within my brain,
the beginning of Doomsday

moving in me from the beginning—madness,
inexplicable dusk closing on
long-vanished waters, shrines
locked inside locked rooms.

M. Cynthia Cheung is the author of Common Disaster (Acre Books, 2025). Her poems can be found in AGNI, Gulf Coast, The Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, swamp pink, among others, and she is the recipient of the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America. She practices internal medicine in Texas.