Worship The Chinese in me lingers like an afterthought A poorly-wrought postscript Delivers in phlegm-filled floors and in the backs of my dreams No room for it in my worship where a White god sits and governs my tongue saying things like I accept you the way you are Redemption A perfect savior for a woman whose mouth forms things like lineage and change and the Wild Wild West Uprooted from a line of rolling vowels to spend the rest of aliveness spitting out hard Rs like lituRgy Devotion in a language that betrays both past and present feels like a sin and to deliver the word for heat and oil instead of the way birds soar is to take a bite into a piece of forbidden fruit and collect its miracles on my lips I’m not supposed to be praying here instead I’m carving my way through space like the way smoke fills altars asking gods with mouths like mine to forgive me for saying words that they’ll never understand
Absence When you leave you’re sucked in by an attractive inferno. Home was a cold place. Home was where jackets and jackets put on by mothers were never enough. Mothers were and mothers were never enough. Words were always how do you say it again. Wet and cold and coldness is leng or liang or never can escape. An escape is a hearth and now you can burn. Stick your tongue into so fucking humid and collect drops bathing. Hunger is just disguised thirst, you know? First cultivated in the womb. Mothers have wombs and wombs have things like oceans. Oceans wrap things in the tightness of their core and after wetness is aliveness it is hard to say. How do you say it again like never look back. The word sounds remembering years ago. Puddles fade into light like everything and the rest of tends to remain in hotness before you’re gone again.
Satiation When my Ma piles rice onto my plate dreaming of the day I’ll explode and hoping that her own flesh and blood could never leave her in a nursing home to rot I wonder if things like biology intrigue me most because the noises my stomach makes when it’s hungry sound like the hurt that comes with the filling of things Like cheeks with balls of food and saliva so I wouldn’t have to say anything to my lao lao as we sat and watched TV in her homeland and anyway It was hot and I was nine and I wasn’t comfortable with subtitles or their absence or how family was gained and absent so easily across oceans Many years later I still swallowed before dialing her with calling cards and saying yes lao lao I’m still learning how to never leave like how Ma left you Blood’s viscosity is supposed to be a channel and not a border but drool feels wet and far in Chinese and its alternatives and when it runs down my face I Think it’s sloppy to be a generational clone that starves for the wetness of the arms and tongues of who came before
Saccharine In my dreams Ma comes to me and says sorry for all the garbage and for burning the rice every other day but bao you still ate it because you didn’t know any better. That night I fell asleep next to a boy who treated me like machine broken no perfect cook every time and I got the feeling that I was an antiheroine, the kind that washed her sheets when they didn’t have stains yet and walked into things no matter how loudly people screamed from behind a silver screen. In the morning, awake now, I perch on the windowsill between sleepy nods, remembering a story Ma told me between grains. Says sorry I moved here because I still can’t stomach ice cream. Who are all these people we’re surrounded with guzzling mouthfuls of sugar bao love is not being desensitized to things this sweet. Don’t act like you didn’t know any better.
Insomnia I pictured the truth when the lights were off, remembering the way we looked in the mirror. How did our reflections brush their teeth or be beautiful, tied to something only said in the past tense? When I woke up next to you you were watching sunrises decay. I thought that there was a name for all of this, like decrepit honesty, or, perhaps, the way we test illusions by feeling. Until briefness comes to pass this time, I’ll become familiar with the backs of things. I’ve been counting you as happiness on my fingers and I’ve run out of my hands. One day I’ll reach like I’m conscious of it.
Departures I dreamed that you said it was brilliant while it lasted. I’m not sure if I agreed because I was less sure of it all. Did I mean to say that I was afraid or just ready? Was the smoke from my cigarette just clouds vomiting into sky? And anyway, we were always so into things. We laughed at the moon and it still wasn’t enough. You were looking at sheets of disposable film. I shook off catastrophes and longed for a third dimension. Because I’d finally gone home I’d forgotten all my geography. If I reached out now, I’d never find what you left.
Allowance When I arrived I didn’t need to tell you how. You looked over and the rest of the world lived on. Between a third or a fourth rib my skin folded over, but it was all pockets of fat around a rearview mirror. In hindsight, loving done. Making eye contact between thighs: is this an ending or a conclusion? Once, at least, it was about godstruck walls. In half cities, where letters of clearance were sent. Reached but never read. Never delivered at that. In the end it wasn’t enough, and we didn’t wait around for the snow. Sundays or curbs. You couldn’t stay when they happened. Finally, like the cold that never came nor left. I’ll see you without direction. Without looking back.
Fair Chance The day won’t come slowly. People won’t stop throwing statistics at me about the nature of broken things. Fucking up wholeness like petals plucked off of flowers. Shelovesme not and it didn’t stop raining the day I wrote you a postcard from home. After the flames I crawled among the wreckage and searched for embers to keep warm. The backs of my eyelids aren’t looking for particulars. No gambles I want to take. The odds might and never will.
Flight
Dawn is assigned to me through a windowsill and I receive it through my limbs like a public service announcement, forcefully jilted from the opposite of questions like do you know what I mean? I mean opposites as absence and the absence of you as memories of trees rattling, your hand grasping the trunk to show increasingly upward fragility who’s boss. Certainty wrought with the sound of baseball bats to windows, the shattering of which I fled alongside the birds into the wax of morning’s light.
The Momentary And when you came to mind it was halfway and it was beautiful. I’d been doing things like this for so long: writing at night, or reading things back to front, or touching sugar and touching cash and buying things like tabloids at the store and not reading at all. But suddenly, you arrived, and it was like the feeling of always looking back. Can you have or feel like beautiful? Can you tell water to evaporate just a little bit slower? I stopped in my tracks to watch the city blend in its vitals, the fountains around me pitching car lights into mist. When the coldness of water landed on my shoulders I caught it all; I must have made the choice, somewhere along the line, to see. Somewhere out there there were stars everywhere. On the ground delineated into maps’ keys as capitals, states whose borders I had yet to protract. Above, spiraling into manifest destiny. Or like water into water or air does to naked eyes. Around me, in the form of opiate-drinking crowds, demanding that I deliver to them thanks. None of this is possible, I mouthed out loud, without you. And you, you stayed with me: in the way that two people at the grocery store reaching for the last pack of gummies on the shelf at the same time and grasping at the other’s fingers instead suddenly understand the power of preference. I whispered you out in the form of the world as car horns and minutes. Acknowledged space. Paid, then left. I was left with the feeling of the momentary on my shoulders drying. I figured, from then on, I’d always be caught in the middle.
For She Who Wrenches Not necessarily apart or together; perhaps directionality doesn’t matter, perhaps Matter, held in your hands, dispels origins, conjures a path out of a plane. Math is simple, human translation of the capability of lines. You folded a piece of paper and said to me write a poem about the way paper crinkles into itself. Instead blueprints seemed too simple and the world and its mercenary machines too flat. We watched birds tilt like compasses into folding suns and you found among it all the fixedness of things. In place I stayed but you followed an angle and became never the same again.