Ana Chen, Audrey Chong, Angela Shu, Chaim Durst, Jeffrey Liao, Trang N. Le
By Ana Chen
please don’t say that.
yesterday evening i shivered beneath a skin of lip stains burrowed
beneath a microphone as the night strangled herself with that crown of
city lights.
i know it’s selfish of me but.
to inhale an electric piano to fever a new face if i raised the exposure
on my cheekbones you could press a breath into every pore between every
webbed jealous thigh.
you make me want to swallow myself.
color me bronze i bite the dust from my nails dig the viscera from my lungs like
pulp from a pumpkin if i wreathed you in cooking oil would you suffocate is it wrong for me
to wish so.
have you ever dissected yourself.
beneath a microscope i burn your vindication in the name of science watch
as david’s roped forearms shrivel engulfed in a ghost pepper flame i gouge my eyes out
next.
i can’t see what’s on the other end of the scale.
you leash extremes whip the archaea i excavate your flooded archives frantic
for some amino acid some marrow of your false eyelashes some tongue for my
scab-sheathed lungs.
i don’t think it’ll go.
if we loiter in the sweat of strangers our stilettos puddling beneath a cotton candy
eye i can sprint through each infuriated bowel each inflamed sorrowful bow an arrow
through the brains.
or are you simply above all this?
Forgetting is another way of saying goodbye
by Audrey Chong
If you want antiques, go to the morning
market tucked behind the alley: a hundred
grandmothers and grandfathers for
the choosing. The sun sleeps on our skin, in
elbows, on egg-heads. We perch on gingham
quilts, stitching nests out of whatever we couldn’t
give to our children before they left. Here,
take this — a roasted chicken, stuffed eggplant,
my only china. Oh, daughter, you are my
only china, my only one for my oneself. I hide your name
in my stomach, where you used to sleep; believe
me when I say I felt you kicking the moment I fell
in love. When I hear your voice on the phone,
I lullaby your name awake, up through my throat,
knowing you need me to be here
still, the way you remember me, as the woman
who mothered you with milk & moon,
in this dust, silvering coins out of silks we couldn’t
waist. Waste is an inherited fear,
one we can’t shake out of our lungs: instinct
is splitting oranges eight-fold, stewing
the same tea leaves for a year. They tell me
I eat apples whole now, tell me I don’t
say your name. Am I still the same? Am I here? —
Is there anything more vintage than our own
blood & bone? I pray to every wedding & war
that has pulled our family together; in
dreams I slip on your bridal dress & play house,
like I am young again & dreaming
of being my mother. The most beautiful body
is a bloated one, limbs heavy
with the weight of something new. I never doubted
motherhood: how it trembled, a swollen sun,
underneath my tongue. Love is a hot thing, &
daughter, how I love you. How I
miss you, when I can’t recall how you look
like me. I lost the curve of your cheek
& cannot say my hands belong to a mother’s;
I am searching for your touch still.
In dreams I slip on your apron & in my arms I hold
three girls, their faces slurred
sweet, & I’m kissing their noses, & what were
their names again? Where are they
now? Why haven’t they come with you? --
Why do all of our children leave, and then take
our memory too? The last time I saw you, you were
mine. Today, you are your own oneself.
Daughter, you must remember for the both of us:
how I love you beyond what this body
has to offer.
By Angela Shu
3 min call
9:14
alarms 8:05 :10 :15 :20 :27
8:30 a fly poked
8:35 my oil spill
8:40 my bra all the pads fallen out
the grime of the laundry bag
50% of my breast at 8:42
50% woman and 50% grime
slosh deep in my gut. 8:48
my secret double gut that only comes out
4:00 when aliens
play pretend night
4:50 i math
you haven’t seen me math
enough oriental sweat to fill 5 hours
4:51 i math 5:51 i math
night is 100% and 3 hours
slept through lecture
i am 50% bad
50% woman
50% chinese through my triple-gut
50% banana my piano teacher told me
Mozart doesn’t compute
in my white insides
14 minutes i
am 14% bad and 86% yellow
3 days for me to send an email
10:15 email and this time
look at the lady’s face.
$30 copay does my insurance need
a diagnosis
(aka
what’s the chance
Northrop Grumman thinks i’m fucking crazy)
10% i say 10%.
they know
“call if urgent” “walk-in if urgent”
is urgent
when i feel 80% bad
is it more like 70% bad
or do i need a 99% purity rating
of sandpaper sadness.
does my face need to look like a 10.
maybe a 10 is a 7 is a 2
mild discomfort is mild
the mild face on the doctor door
is yellow
my octo-guts at 9:14
i am not so urgent right now,
9:14 i am as mild as Sriracha
now i am not so urgent
i am 90% chinese and 10% urgent
no emergency no urgent
no emergency no urgent
mild is mild
now i am 100% grime
on my restaurant’s glass.
no urgent no urgent
have a
nice day
by Chaim Durst
Heads, You Win
If I said “Love Train,”
Wrote it on that hand-made
Paper I have, the one with poppies
Embedded in it,
Golden filigree-like,
Placed it in your mailbox
For you to discover one foggy
Morning,
Would you know
How much,
Just how much
I love you?
Tails, You Lose
If I said “Madness,”
Wrote it on that spit-spackled
Pillow I have, the one with my
Tears embedded in it,
Sapphire-like,
Placed it under my blanket
For you to discover one
Nightmare,
Would you know
How much,
Just how much
I need you?
By Jeff Liao
June – Hunan Province
Six time zones and an ocean around the globe,
I find myself in the village of my grandmother’s birth.
Mandarin syllables clash in the air like a dying
trombone, and the only language I understand here
is the rattle of a wishbone beggar’s cup of pennies.
Toothless men split the fields in two, the
earth giving birth to a cracked dryness. The drought
marinates its tongue in dust and grass, a stillborn summer.
Here, the only wife the farmers know is the sun,
a shared mistress who shouts scorching words
at her men, their spines bent like dog-eared books,
backs raw and blistering like splintered bamboo.
Children with ash-sunken faces and twigs for arms
heave buckets of water over trembling shoulders,
screaming with their fists. In a parallel universe,
I could be one of them. Learning arithmetic
on the gray dirt floor of a hut, the only future
I’d ever know lying in the endless green meadows
of a rice paddy. This place is haunted, I say
over a mouthful of thin stale rice, my grandmother’s
blue-veined hands bathed in dough for evening baozhi.
Here lies the carcass of a mongoose in the womb
of the fields, forgotten and eaten away by flies.
A boy rides his bike across the crumbling paths,
and all of the villagers stop and stare, their gazes
lifeless and brimming with hunger. A town of
tired corpses, people who are dead but
still breathing. My grandmother and I leave before
the copper sun awakens to punish her men for
another failed year, their savings burning up
faster than the cries of their children. Here,
I cannot stay. I cannot bear to watch this place
fold, to witness her weeping in the earth’s arms.
July – Tiananmen Square, Beijing
This city is the heaviest smoker I know.
I can feel the constriction of her lungs as she
exhales, skyscrapers climbing into industrial smog
instead of the stars. In Beijing, we breathe
through our mouths because it smells like tar
and formaldehyde, a perpetual decaying. The night
my grandfather dies, the street traffic below
is drowned out by a chilling silence, the world holding
its breath. His skin a roadmap of fissures, pulse fluttering
out of his chest like a bird, empty-nested.
My grandmother cries herself to sleep,
the wrinkles of her face filled with saltwater tears
like branches of an estuary. My mother brings
her coffee while my grandmother dry heaves
into the toilet, imagining her husband’s lungless lips,
his half-lidded eyes, swollen with the mourning light.
The next day, we come to Tiananmen Square,
where a thousand bloodied footsteps linger,
where my grandfather once stood with a tank pointed
at his unafraid mouth. I feel the tip of a bayonet shove its way
down my throat – I could be executed for writing this poem.
Three red flags wave at me, carrying the bullet wounds
of a nation refusing to be silenced. The city’s acidic breath of gasoline
and burning newspapers stains the air black. This, I think,
is what my bones are made of. This ancestral heartbeat.
This constellation of voices, unapologetic and loud.
Yellow boys and girls with proud eulogies tattooed over
their hearts, singing through the gunshots,
singing through the blood.
August - Nanjing
It is impossible to measure the darkness in a body.
I close my eyes and imagine the screams of
three-hundred thousand Chinese as they fall
in front of my grandfather’s eyes. Rain pulls
at my vision – its pitter-patter a song for drowned
streets, a march of death. The drenched ocean
of the sky glistens with sorrow, and mothers
with child-bearing hips curl their stomachs inward like
spoons, ready to break themselves on instinct.
At Nanjing University, where my grandfather
once studied, poison ivy vines fester on the molding
brick facade like mosquitoes, like the Imperial soldiers
who ravaged this soil and called it rebirth. In spring,
Nanking cherries sprout from the harsh earth and
the wind chimes churn like prayers unanswered.
Here is the bougainvillea pavilion my grandfather
and his friends once walked under, joking between classes,
etched with the shadows of their fingerprints. Here
is the shaved ice store – now an apartment –
where he spent lazy afternoons with a dictionary in his hand,
searching for a word to describe his war-plundered veins,
his ears which heard feverish vibrations and gunshots in
the laughter of children. Here is the library where my grandparents
first met, now a crumbling skeleton, but which was once
a paradise of words. Grandpa, a student, glasses
angled crookedly over the bridge of his nose.
Grandma, a girl from the countryside, visiting with a friend,
who, as she picked up a book he had dropped, brushed her
fingers over his and never let go. This, I think,
is what it must feel like to know the homeland that bore me.
To stand here with my mother and grandmother, three generations
rooted and unbroken, as they pass down the weight
of our history onto me. Someday I’ll wear their
phantoms under my eyes, their shared scars. My own
child will trace the scars onto his fragile, small body,
wondering how it feels to have carried something
this heavy for so long.
by Trang N. Le
The day I cut this
Body into pieces
Too many to count
Glued it to every
Mouth that I can
Devour
To every eye that
I can bind
To every tongue
I can favor
To every voice
I can hear
Copy and
Paste copy
And paste
Copy and
Paste
Until I
Look
Smell
Talk
Lie
Like you.