Our guide finishes his tour
at a shop that features
an artist who cuts paper.
Awards hang on the walls.
He asks for my birth year,
folds a small red paper in half
and begins to cut with scissors
smaller than we use for nails.
In less than ten minutes he hands me
a double dragon, delicate, precise.

He had no way to know
how alluring I find this
fanciful vision of hybrid life,
how I had been looking at guardian figures
on rooftops in Shanghai and Beijing for days,
counting them to gauge their owners' value.
Nine dragons for the Emperor,
fewer for anyone else. 

I carry my two red dragons humbly.
No matter how many lives I've lived,
I am no Emperor. Two is plenty for me.

© by Estella Lauter. 
Used with the author's permission.