Fortune Center
by Ping Yi Yee
Perched on a barstool beside
an abbot in maroon robes who mumbles
in Mandarin on a widescreen TV
atop a humming ice cream freezer,
explaining how the latest research
in theoretical physics is reaching
the same tenets on reality.
Eating chunky blue ice cream in pink cups,
the spouse on her high chair,
caramel topping with free cookie
a bitter coffee at dusk; the son rehearsing
across at the midtown fine arts campus
built atop demolished colonial shophouses
where grandma sold her charcoal and gas.
Another monk behind the first, a second screen
inside some charity offering pastel flyers
while the vegetarian store shutters, mirroring
the Buddhist and Hindu temples next door.
The caffeine workhorse grunts, rumbles, spits
twin employees thumping and scooping:
nightclub gals grab their treat and cuppa,
residents top off speakeasy meals with dessert,
worshippers calorify before public transport home.
Later the phone chimes: Done where r u?
We swivel off, past a gauntlet of lively cafés
out onto Bencoolen Street, formerly
the Fifth Horse Carriageway in dialect,
departing Fortune Center, this place
of old souls and new lives
ageless prayers, fresh dreaming.
Ping Yi Yee writes poetry, travelogues and fiction, and is in public service. His work has appeared in Litro, London Grip, Meniscus, La Piccioletta Barca, and Sideways, among others, and is forthcoming in Poetry Breakfast and Harbor Review. Ping Yi is from Singapore, and has also lived in Boston, MA, and Cambridge, UK.
