Original Poetry

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.

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.

III.

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.

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.

Reprise

After "Seven" by Taylor Swift

This summer, I turned seven again. You came to

live with me and we became pirates. Here

on this beach, we lifted our shirts into baskets

and gathered coconuts. Listen, I’ve got a plan.

We’ll run away to Switzerland, hopefully

it will be winter. If not, we’ll slide down the Matterhorn

with Gruyère on the table top. You can keep your hair

safe in a braid. If you want, I could show you how

to land a shifty. With your eyes closed, you asked me.

When is the next flight to Pennsylvania? Startled, I turn

around to see you praying to snow angels on the ground.

留下街道 [Liuxia¹ 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.”

1. Liuxia - stay.

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

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.

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)
   

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. I thought, this

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

my jiùjiu ⁴ meng are knocking on doors

across huáng qīn yuàn ⁶ with baskets full of red dates.

The ā gōng ⁵ 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.

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
   

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.

事故 // INCIDENT1

After Layli Long Soldier

INCIDENT. From incidere. A word

of falling into–to cut, to trespass, to bleed.

In law, attaching to. In body, detaching from.

INCIDENT: the broom-handle jabbing the gut

into shards of glass, lodged where spine meets air.

Winter breath stabbing nostrils, sharp as the t

capping incident: that final huff, the icicle of a joke

snapping. Lips tightening. Tongue clicking teeth.

In place of incident, teachers explain it as:

A blank space where the body was.

The sound of a rib cracking. (See: DANGER.)

The moss growing inside throats. (See: GUILT.)

INCIDENT(S). Plural. Reefs harboring boats

long-since wrecked, split open. Groaning wood. Wood

filling with water. Dirt. Glass becoming seaglass. No–

they are rifts. Lacerations. Wounds pried wide to hold

everything politicians leave unsaid.

INCIDENT: the soldier who knows blood like his daughter’s

braid, knows fire like his mother’s stove. As the tide

recedes, he lines the bodies neat, legal margins along the ditches.2

RECOGNITION: He lies, believing he doesn’t

recognize the faces once he wipes the mud from their cheeks.

1. Note: The title of this poem, shìgù, means incident in Mandarin. The translation of individual characters are: 事 shì–event. 故 gù–cause. 事故 reversed is 故事, which means story.
   
2. Official records note. Fragments. Zhejiang, 1954-1983. 1954.5.3 — Chén Yuánqīng (陈元青)’s timber raft capsized in floodwaters at Shíguǒjiāng. 1961.6.3 — Fāng Měidì (方美弟) drowned steering grain barge through Qīngwān Rapids. 1974.8.20 — Unlicensed passenger boat overturned near Baiyán. 4 dead. Captain Wú (吴). 1975.6.19 — Hu (胡)’s overloaded vessel struck reefs at Táohuā Shallows. Lǐ Xīngnán (李星南)—Yúnhé town’s Hydrology Director—among lost. 1983.3.4 — Wú Sōngchéng (吴松成)’s freighter sank at Tānkēng Reef. 24 aboard. 5 fatalities.
   

Abecedarian for August

Gambier, Ohio

At the window, I see that summer makes bodies

become slow rivers of dandelion fluff and gravel dust, salt-slicked

concrete slabs pressing up against each other like

days. They stretch, panting like dogs on fire escapes,

each passing freight train shuddering the pavement. Even our shadows

flatten, crawling into the cold promise of gutters that exhale

garbage: cicada husks, barbed wires, sun-bleached bottle caps.

How long can a body hold this season? Maybe when it’s over

I’ll stop waving at buses on the street. Maybe I’ll stay

just a kid mistaking headlights for Grandma’s

kitchen lights melting into the Qiántáng River. Come inside! Her voice

laced with cicada static, moth-thin &

muffled, as if still leaking through her screen door

now, soft as a daydream, as the asphalt cooling under

overcast skies. Even when heat sags over the camphor trees. Even then.

Please make it stop. Please

quantify how much time we’ve got left.

(Really? That’s your way out?)

(Shush.)

There, the sky splits with lightning, the thunder threatening

unspeakable grief as the body staves off sleep,

viaducts overflowing all night long.

When it ends, send

X-rays of my body to the Qiántáng River. Let pigment lick from film.

You’ve left me. You’ve left me, love. And this

zeitgeist is shit.

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.

小作文 ¹

The sky glowed azure

above the field, still morning-wet. Daisies

rang along the sidewalk. Yellow petals guarded

pedestrians’ hearts, curling in the 留下 ² ’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

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.

1. xiǎo-zuò-wén, the direct translation is “little essay.”
2. liú-xià, name of the street, the direct translation is “stay.”