Offering

BY Tsering Wangmo Dhompa

An abattoir is not on the city tour because tourists
do not want to see death. They surmise that being poor,
we are naturally without longing. The poor are happy,
they observe from a distance. We kill the water buffalo
and cows live to ransack vegetables out for sale.
To remain silent is on occasion to suffer. Again, it is
the poor that gives to the divine or to the idea anyway.
The sage said, Young men will use you like the taxis
of this city. To live alone is your lot, he issued.
Monkeys swooped on flowers laid out
by women in sheathes of red.

 

Biography

TSERING WANGMO DHOMPA is the author of three titles from Apogee Press: In the Absent Everyday (2005), Rules of the House (2002, finalist for the Asian American Literary Awards in 2003) and My rice tastes like the lake (forthcoming). She received her MA from University of Massachussetts and her MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. Other publications include two chapbooks, In Writing the Names (A.bacus, Potes & Poets Press, 2000) and Recurring Gestures (Tangram Press, 2000). Wangmo Dhompa received a grant from the Cultural Equity Grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission and the Galen Rowell Fund. A former fellow at MacDowell Colony and Hedgebrook, she was raised in the Tibetan exile communities of Nepal and India. She now lives in San Francisco.

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