Ars Poetica

I. 

 

​I’ve been here before. Look: the road 

folds into the next one, the domestic

nesting within industry’s soot-soft breath. 

Five dumpsters, neatly aligned, mist 

rotten vegetables into the air, yesterday’s

stir-fry radiating oil from the windows

along the first floor. Stacked steel

piping softens the piles of redbricks 

they crush across the way. Sometimes

I blink to be sure I am seeing the same street 

as the man dragging a spitting hose across 

the grid of concrete in front of me, and the girl 

adjusting her ponytail in her bike mirror—

we touch shadows as I pass. Your presence frays 

the edges of the afternoon, turning 

sunlight into memory, fogging my neck.

II.

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I tell nobody about the street.

Vegetables gone rotten, birds chattering 

through the blare of cicadas. 

Herb tea. Airpods. Mosquito repellent.

Just within earshot, I wait for you.

III.

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People pass. They could ask

what I’m writing, but they don’t. 

I want to stop them, say 

This is a poem. Not 

the street, but the cloud flowering 

into a storm above us, ready 

to wrestle buds from the trees.

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Late October

 

The buildings blur, stitching 

across the sky’s shoulder. Runners

thin into the horizon. If I could

stand just a little bit taller, perhaps

I could see them all at once. Will

my gaze be a caress? A kindling? 

A silent reminder of what’s left 

unsaid? You turn away. Your eyes

don’t hold mine. My breath finds 

your neck. You lean closer, shadows

blending into one as the Hangzhou sun 

scattered into buckshot, not bird

nor bullet, but wild, rippling through

the autumn air. It holds what 

you don’t talk about anymore. You 

look ahead. Your vest flares electric

marigold. Your steps flick through reeds

with a certain hush. I follow. Your pace 

thrumming in my ear, a heartbeat

I memorize. Our palms snap into each

passing spectator’s. Each other’s, then 

part. Light breaks over the edge 

of the cornfields, the riverbeds gone 

dry. I used to flinch. Now, I hold 

a watch. I hold your gaze, slicing 

the field into the parking lot. I know 

where the pocket of light begins: 

waiting, just beyond the shadow 

we make as you pass, the shadow 

opening like a palm I step inside.

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My Father Never Told Me Tales of Our Past
 
Instead, he put 根 [roots] in our names.
 
He named us as if we were trees
reaching into the earth: 传根 [passing root].
根生 [taking root]. 木根 [wooden root].
He wanted us to hold on to nothing
but air and the soil under our feet.
 
传根 [passing root] was the oldest.
He had a godmother who was a neighbor
or some cousin, who only visited once 
each year, at Spring Festival. She cupped his face 
each time, whispering words I never learned 
to translate: 喝糖水蜜蜜甜，好养活！[1]

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根生 [taking root] was the youngest.
He was also the tallest, courtesy
of his name. He started growing
the moment he touched the ground.
He laid beside our father every night.
 
I was named 木根[wooden root]. 
Father said, I gave you this name so you remember
to support your older brother, to care 
for your younger brother. Tough, tender.

 

Father told me bean sprouts grow best at night.
So since age five, every night, I tiptoe out
of the shared bedroom, half-blind
in 3 AM’s dark, wading into the garden
to water them. And pluck them. Toss, lift, repeat.
The next day. And then the next. It doesn’t take
a genius to understand why I’m the shortest.
 
One night, I tore through a maple
in the yard by the river and saw
a head of hair. Long, wet. Convoluted—
my ancestry yanked in thick strands from 1952.

When I realized there were no 根 [roots]
beneath it, I filled the cavity with dirt.
 
Father told me he was taking me to a movie.
We walked without saying a word, then
returned without saying a word.
 
I can’t remember what year it was.

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—

[1] 喝糖水蜜蜜甜，好养活—Have some sugar water, it’s sweet. (You’ll be) easier to raise! (in Mandarin)

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Boatman Guild

 

Hangzhou | for my grandfather

 

You rinsed your name in the current 

and watched it dissolve– 

the last letters tangled in riverweed as the rest 

drifted down the channel’s muddy throat.

 

The oars roughen your palms to bark, their grain

running like veins, circling like tree rings. Softened 

by the swelling river, silenced. The old men 

call it niánlún, but you called it claimed. 

 

You tell yourself the cold won’t climb your spine

this time, but it roots itself along your spine anyway. 

It yanks your legs straight, tugs tendons 

stiff as wire against bone, twisting joints into stubborn knots.

 

You lift your arms above your head, in prayer

or surrender–as a child, no one told you

the difference. And you sing, across 

translation, a new tide:  

 

Water shakes the boat, water grants no rest.

How many copper coins for a life river-bent?

June chars the loach black as scorched earth.

December frostbites purple butterflies.

 

Water shakes the boat, water grants no rest.

How many copper coins for a life river-bent?

A thousand knots of poverty stitch this shirt.

 

You sleep rough on the dry banks, the sky leaking

through woven reeds. No tether, no anchor. You let

the river name you, knowing not to let it 

near the current. Knowing it will dissolve.

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Origin Story: Friday Night in Gambier, Ohio

 

On Friday night, you wouldn’t leave the library.

Instead, you wrote your name over and over 

on the white board: cursive, messy. Bold. The smell 

sharp and chemical, determined to last forever.

 

I watched you shape each syllable

on your lips: ah-nah-ni-ah. The sound of it 

baffling yet prayer-soft, as if guiding your hand. 

I said it back to you: again and again, astonished

 

a name could float like memory, without ever needing 

your lips to touch. A sound rehearsed until it forms 

its own body of meaning: up & down, the tongue,

flapping, a pink tulip in the wind. And I think 

 

to myself, remembrance begins with this: turning

toward me, exasperated: of course, there will still be 

internet & French fries & cupcakes & mayonnaise

when I go back to India: but this library: good libraries

 

last forever. I laughed too quickly to sound 

nonchalant. We’ll still text, and one day you’ll come

to China: we’ll bake biscuits, turn them each

into whoopie pies, like Anne Hathaway.

 

“Maybe I should kidnap a butterfly.” And I thought

that’s how remembrance really begins: with a name

and a place, something small you can’t leave behind.

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留下街道 [Liuxia Street]

 

Hangzhou

 

Once more, I am stranded in the moonless
passageway, exhaust fumes and food waste

 

festering the rims, wet summer wind
stirring my hair, thick strands sticking to my forehead

 

like peeling mangos to pavement. Bottle flies. Smashed
bricks. Sofa shredding its worn-out linen. Cushions

 

crusting beneath the stacked conduits, wooden planks
gift-wrapped. Hangzhou’s street lanterns offering

 

a dizzying yellow haze—they are silent soldiers 

delineating the straight path in silhouettes gone

 

blurred, so reassuringly that I almost forget
September’s griefs jabbing my tinnitus: it starts 

 

as a low hum, then sizzles, the sound of someone
placing a skewer on the grill, pressing against

 

the heated iron plate till I can hear, unequivocally, the rhythm
of what we expect. But what else would I expect? 

 

I am stranded in a moonless wet market. Rotten 

eggs, days-old cucumbers stinking a pool 

 

of rainwater (or blood-water). Salt 

on granite. Fish gills flapping the cutting board.

 

A red-cheeked man in a greasy apron shuffles

sweet potatoes into a hellish oven. Then, a pair of eyes

 

waver—cherry-colored, startled. Teary, through

the bars of a cage in a shattered echo, staring

 

right at me. A rabbit. A rabbit.

 

“Fifteen yuan,” says the owner. “Per kilogram.”
“You can stir-fry it with peppercorn and ginger.” 

 

Somewhere down the alley, the rough-edged drag

of a rusted tricycle sings flaked iron into the air.

 

Overhead, a plane pushes swallows past the clouds
as the sky pales with nothingness. I see

 

the faint flash of planes behind grey tendrils. I hear

a metallic shrill start to ring from a freight truck nearby —

 

危险. 危险. 危险.

DANGER. DANGER. DANGER.

 

To the owner, I say, “I’m taking it home.”

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小作文

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The sky glowed azure 
above the field, still morning-wet. Daisies 
rang along the sidewalk. Yellow petals guarded

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pedestrians’ hearts, curling in the 留下[stay]’s wind. 
I took a picture so the future could prove the light 
once fell like this. Exactly this way, each pixel

 

piecing together precise shards of what we remember:
the swollen sky, the clouds billowing & blood-
shot orange, not cliché until I said let’s go
to Shanghai & you laughed. I’m like

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a dog & you’re the mother.
Why not     reach for a city to name
the nameless drift between us. You knew it 

before I did—so I said 光阴似箭，日月如梭 .
What’s so cliché about that? Waiting to resurface 
months later, the answer unspools 

through my phone’s camera roll as I scroll
through memories: its loftiness, your breath’s 
little note between 箭 [arrow] & 梭 [shuttle], knowing

the punchline would soon scatter into shadows 
across the pavement. Maybe it was the way 
we wrote it—overwrote it—through elementary school 

[小作文] until the last Chinese cicada shuttered.

In the background of those memories, the bench 
still glows with the question you asked, how 
to translate 光阴 [time] without sacrificing the swiftness & swagger

of departure. It’s still morning-wet, the daisies still
ringing the meaning’s light & shade along the sidewalk: 
日’s [day’s] sun, 月’s [month’s] moon. 

But time flew by like an arrow. Days slipped
through like a weaver’s shuttle. The translation 
faded into the wrong light—into pixels, blurred by time. 

 

 

 

 

Meditation on Memory with Wind in My Ear

 

I know the left side of your face—

your chin protruding, thin with loneliness.

Skin flaked like huángtǔ[1]. Fine

hair whispering across your cheek. You

carry me, still five years old, then

tuck me in the basket of your iron bicycle.

 

As we cross the kindergarten yard, pedals clouded

from the dust-caked ground, you glance

over your left shoulder. Your eyes press

into the afternoon’s humid cotton, dark beads.

 

June will always smell of wet cement.

 

***

 

Even in memory, your scar’s pink crescent

glimmers on your neck, fluorescent

as the light overhead. Memory stays

loyal to the sound of the door opening

that day you came home, catching the wound in light.

 

I still hear, “zē sá di!”[2]

“ván bē ze– ván bē ze–”[3]

 

I said nothing, listening to the adults.

 

***

 

Other scars took longer to surface. They surfaced

quietly, soft as autumn. Once I realized remembering

your bad days could leave scars, I tried not to see you

hunched on a stool in the middle of the living

room, each time I hurried up the stairs.

But sometimes, turning the corner, I met your pupils

plucked and sun-dried, organic in absence.

 

I remembered how shame chiseled you down, bit

by bit. How your skin thinned to tofu skin. I thought, this

is how it begins: vanishing. Last month, grandma told me

my jiùjiu meng[4] are knocking on doors

across huáng qīn yuàn[5] with baskets full of red dates.

 

The ā gōng[6] was caught, a breath

choked back into my throat. Before I could

turn back, Ma urged me forward. That’s when

 

I heard you say bǎobǎo.[7]

 

***

 

The iron bicycle shakes slightly as I cross

my right leg over the backseat. We take off—

 

you are stronger than my father.

I tell you, but you chuckle, say that

 

is impossible. Impossible as the wind in my ear.

 

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—

[1] huángtǔ黄土—yellow soil

[2] zē sá di 干什么—do what (in Hangzhou dialect)

[3] ván bē ze 犯不着—It’s not worth it (in Hangzhou dialect)

[4] jiùjiu meng 舅舅们—maternal uncles

[5] huáng qīn yuàn 皇亲苑—Royal Kinsman’s Park (name of neighborhood)

[6] ā gōng 阿公—grandpa, my mother’s father

[7] bǎobǎo 宝宝—baby

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Self Portrait as a Sifter

 

         What does it feel like

         to be washed over —

        to keep almost nothing? 

          Leaf shards sprinkle 

             onto my chest — they become

      my skin. Your hand 

             finds my waist, shakes me

            so hard lightning ricochets 

                through my skull. Still

                  those remains dangle,

                    refusing to let go.

 

           You peel them 

            from my splintered shoulders.

 

                                   That’s what you do.

 

              You strip me bare

                    to face the dust

                     that remembers my weight.

                   You stroke the rise 

                  of my jagged spine—

                 the bend it learned young—

               until I scatter into that dark channel

        beneath the stove, disappearing

with each flame’s metallic whisper.

         Then, you turn me again. 

 

   Overhead, the waves
    billow: here is the red jujube.
          Here is the hot water.
            My tea. My jujube. My body.

            Everything falls through 

 

          your fingers as you press them

        into the cage of my spine.

 

                   There. Feel it? The shards

 

               roughening the stitching

             along my back, the steel wires 

 

               drawn through my ribs:

                 ninety-nine needles

                  I never pulled out.

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Winter Solstice

 

Sometimes it gets too cold to write. 

The cold needles through my gloves, stiffens

my knuckles as words scatter, small and brittle

as road salt before a spiral of snow.

 

But not today. Today, I shiver 

through each gust of wind, but I don’t 

let my words drop to the sidewalk.

 

Turning towards the year’s end, the keyboard

shadowing under my hovering fingers. 

I pull my hand from my pocket, again. 

And again. 

 

It seems I have to be careful with what 

I say in my poems. The wind fills

my nose, sharpens its point.

 

I turn my head, catch the Christmas decor 

anchoring the double doors. Behind 

clouded glass, Lady Starbucks stares 

serenely, a faint smile thinning her lips. 

She waits with me—a patron saint of what is 

unwritten, forever watching the world before her.

 

Behind us, a man sweeps leaves, his broom erasing 

a poetic draft no one will ever read. The leaves 

crackle after lying still so long, lifted

briefly, dropped again—like lifting the cover

of an ancient volume, hearing the lightning-crack 

of its spine echo through the library.

 

But now, the volumes are sleeping in their cases, the gusts 

knocking against their windows. They know

what we spend years of cold writing to find.

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