Wo Chan
Glasses
The overly passionate
optometrist
exclaims they’re way
too big
for you though
I say
I have a heart-
shaped face.
She places me
into her
spaceship chair
and pumps
so that I rise
to face
the lamp-lit mirror. She goes
I know
they’re in vogue
right now
but they do you, really
no favors,
hides your face
entirely
and you’ve really got
quite a face.
I say I need
the large frames to counterweigh
my brazen, Asian
cheekbones.
I smile.
She’d have me look like
an accountant
if she could, fit me a titanium
pair, compact
and silver, intelligent
like the wink
on the hood of a car.
What do you see?
she asks
turning from me,
without squinting or straining
tell me the best you can
what you see.
I recite the train of alphabet,
suspenseful
in their meaninglessness,
while she nods
and flips through lenses, berates my right
eye’s astigmatism.
Can I even apologize?
I’m signed up
for half yearly
checkups,
a date in March,
my least favorite month
She slides my glasses
back onto face.
My frames are plastic, cheap and clunky,
chosen
without class or thought for their material
dignity.
Surprising though
how gingerly she handles them,
slipping the legs
over my monkey ears,
the lenses newly wiped clean
and she is clear
now, near sixty
with hands that have touched
the many
near blind.
She leans in
and asks
now what
does a young man
like you
study? Her expression,
lines,
more worry than laugh,
run every direction
of the rose,
onto her neck
(that her body may have expression too)
and across her cheeks,
somehow ample
and still completely
uncontained
by her tiny,
golden frames.
How can a young man
like me
not fall in love with her
in this dim-lit room?
This time, not even my glasses
will keep my heart in place.
Wo Chan is a recent graduate of the University of Virginia’s Area Program for Poetry Writing where he received the Rachel St. Paul Poetry Award for his work. Wo was a finalist for the cream city review Poetry Contest and his poems appear in the journal. Wo is a Kundiman fellow and plans to pursue an MFA. He currently lives in Brooklyn, where he works as a makeup artist by day and performs with the drag alliance, Switch N’ Play by night.