because those cost a thousand dollars
and I’m not even talking about the great
hotels, because those are a billion dollars
an hour. I have to find the hotels where,
swear to God, there have been holes in
the wall so wide that I once passed my
car keys through it, to my cousin, who
forgot something inside. And then
there was the hotel, in Toronto, no less,
where a cop came to my door, knocked,
and told me that I didn’t want to stay
there. I’d already checked in. He said
he saw my license plate, that (yup) I’m
American, and said that I might want
to go to another hotel. I asked what
happened and he said, I’m not allowed
to say, and I imagined dead bodies piled
up on the other side of the walls, and
imagined that there were ticking bombs
in the swimming pool that was empty,
seen from my window, a perfect view
of the absence of water, and then I said,
Thank you, which made no sense, and
closed the door, and lied in bed, as
there was nowhere for me to go, this
feeling that if the building was about
to catch fire, then I deserved it, that
my dumb poverty was something I
somehow worked for, that it was my
fault to join the military, go in, get my
head drowned in explosive nothingness,
lose sleep over not having enough sleep,
get sick on sickness, its libraries that had
more porn than poetry (and that is not
an exaggeration), the beer vending
machines at the end of our barracks
hallway, how it was impossible to get
orange juice or real milk, but I could
get drunk twenty-four-seven, and then
the war where one bunkmate turned
bulimic, his way of coping, and then
another roommate got caught reading
out loud passages from his New
Testament while masturbating, got
sent for a psych eval and came back
stamped Good To Return To Work,
and then the suicides, how one night
I looked up and saw that the moon
had a rope tied around its glowing
neck, and there was a madness, pure
madness, when most of us weren’t
even front lines, because there is
no front in war anymore, just this
sort of chaos, where this child, and
we were all children, had just re-
turned from a bombing, and we
were at the mess hall, and some-
one asked him, How’d it go? and
he stopped eating, and said, How’d
it go? How’d it go! and he said,
This is how and took his plate,
lifted it over his head, filled with
food, and slammed it down, so
that potatoes parachuted from
the ceiling and peas crashed
into napkin holders and milk
pressed into our faces and he
gazed at us with the skin of
the dead and he ate every single
sleeping child in the world and
you could see there was a free-
way in his lungs and he tied his
chair back into a knot and walked
out of the room, taking the air
with him, and we sat there, in
hunger, and our childhoods were
on display, and war makes you
insane and insanity makes you
war, and war is the Deep End
and my PTSD counselor told me,
Just so you know, there’s no cure
for PTSD and then my other
PTSD counselor, when I told her
that, said, Don’t listen to a word
he said and I tried to erase my past,
but I can’t, tried, for years, to just
punch myself in the side of my
skull to try to reset my memory,
tried to chalkboard-fingernail
everything out of my brain, but
it’s so stuck in there, the Marine
that put his M16 in his mouth,
tasted the air-cooled, gas-operated
carbon steel, the theft of child-
hood, the honor of nothing and
everything, the fever of history,
the way that Thank you for your
service makes me draw my knees
into my chest, how the barracks
always scared me, especially
after the deaths, and, now, tonight,
for the first time, I went into my
phone, and started deleting all
the names of the dead, just
scrolling through, finding their
name (or their nickname), how
there was this opposite feel
when it was put into the phone,
how it was this new friendship,
and then, now, tonight, clicking
on their name, hitting Edit, then
Delete Contact and it was, at one
time, a contact, so much touching
in the military, how every single
bunkmate had their own distinctive
smell, a rot that was solely theirs,
and, now, it is a deletion, to take
out, cut out, strike out, and I’m
left with this empty apartment,
this cheap apartment, how I
always have to search and search
and search and search and search
and search to find some shit-
hole I can afford, some off-
kilter crypt where I never even
buy furniture, because I know
it would be stolen, keep all
the window shades open to
show how there’s nothing inside,
just my trembling body,
​and no one wants to have that.

Back to: Issue Eight

Next: Spencer Silverthorne

like all the other honey-lipped girls here, you hold this secret between the slits of your teeth: soft & pink & overripe with the night’s stickiness & the pork drippings from yesterday’s dinner. someone in the next room singsongs a children’s lullaby & it grates through the cloth of your milk-blue gown, paper-thin as a breath. the moon is silver & gaping & won’t stop leaking cold light against your bare skin. you bite down hard until the stale nectar on your breath turns to metal & blood.
 
tonight you dream of swallowing the moon. of smearing milk powder & peach juice across your warm mouth. of leaving through the window with a cherry-red wicker-basket & a dead gps, of running & running & running until the earth sputters out.
 
all the other sicknesses make you ugly, you know, they make you washed-out & cotton-stuffed. this one turns you soft & pink & fuckable. maybe that’s why you’re not trying. maybe that’s why you’ve rewritten your biography as an arithmetic sequence: small into smaller into gone.
 
the doctors wear all-white that make them look heavy with ghosts. the nurses teach you card games, sometimes. most of the time they watch you with their fisheyes searing constellations into your back.
 
the other girls share secrets with you. this is how to be pretty, & how to be liked. this is how to empty yourself gracefully, & how to die. this is how to be already halfway there.
 
you find it funny: how you only recognize the shape of your body when your limbs are blurred by bathwater. last time, you nearly drowned trying to flush sunflower seeds & milk taffy from the hollows of your esophagus. you lift yourself out, imagining this: 24-hour escape, cliff-bathing in colder streams, unsuturing your skin & wearing your ribcage like a necklace. the bathroom-tile walls press themselves closer with every breath.
 
your mother asks if there’s a boy. maybe it’s her fault, she says. maybe she spoonfed you so many fairytales that you grew up thinking you could be juliet. every girl wants to be wanted, she says.
 
maybe it was that boy you met last july under a red-bodied moon & two scoops of cotton-candy ice cream. the one who took you to the shore & kissed you in rhythm to the gentle lull of the waves, who gave you a whole world in the palm of your hand; until you realized one night, with his nectar tongue against your razor teeth, that you could never love him the way he loved you, because you were too many sharp edges & potholes that you tried to fill with his outline. he’s in arkansas now with a job selling vintage CDs, & you haven’t talked, & you’re still trying to fill the holes with pieces of everyone else.
 
so you answer, it’s complicated. because bloodshot eyes and cracked enamel don’t make a girl wanted. because this is the only way you know how to hold your body close. this is the only way to have a destination, because you don’t want to be that girl riding the back of a tow truck in circles around a barren field. this is how to know there’s a ground level: to know that if you fall, you won’t keep falling forever.
 
everyone else has written letters home by now, but you’ve forgotten how to spell. because your brain is all fucked up now, & because there’s not enough breath between the syllables of i miss you & i’m gonna be okay, okay to ask for forgiveness, & then to ask if your mother still sings along to your favorite song on the stereo. you want to fold yourself into the flap of a red-lettered envelope & mail yourself home, or into the space between your mother’s arms. but you’re not a poet, & you don’t know how to walk away from the warmest place you’ve been given.
 
there is no ending to this elegy. all the honey-lipped girls are dead, you know, & none of this is beautiful. which is to say: there are pieces of you everywhere now, but never enough to make a whole. which is to say: maybe you’ve lost the game, but maybe there was no way of winning to begin with. which is to say: even at the bottom of the well, you’re still dreaming of bluer skies.

Back to: Issue Eight 

Next: Ron Riekki 

0:01

Brown roof, blue roof,
Blue, blue, blue, brown
​
0:11

​0:25
​
Everyone minds
the difference
between the tenuous
and tender.

1:26

Everyone forgets
to mind the surge.

1:34

​1:52
​
Everyone flubs
their own farewell
to become a stranger.

​2:16
​
Pity these foals
trembling
in the midst
of these strangers’
passing wonder.

​2:48
​
Vector, here and there,
with some fingers to the sky.
​
2:52

Back to: Issue Eight

Next: Patty Paine

***

April Fools’, 2013. A decade after the abandonment of all artistic expression. You are deposited into a world of disquietude, confusion, and dissonance, waiting for Enya to come home. Let’s break up, you practice, but that doesn’t sound right. Instead you try 我們分手吧. It sounds better, but only in a slow, linguistic way. In Mandarin, there is none of the absolute dissolution characterized by breaking up--there is only 分手吧, a reluctant parting of hands, a goodbye.

On the thin slice of TV, rioting cymbals and paiban scurry across the stage of Farewell My Concubine. You and Enya watched this film too many times to count, the first few times with your respective families when it first came out in 1993, then the two of you together on this couch after your parents tsked and said it was too homosexual, too tragic. But even though you had to sit through the entire 171 minutes on a couch too sweaty for the summer heat, Enya liked it too much for you to turn it off. Enya has always been more transfixed by the ineffable tragedy of the film—a main character who was forced to become a Peking opera actor, a protagonist who breathed in tandem with the 旦 he portrayed on stage, a boy who blurred the lines between stage and reality until he gave up his life to find the answer.

He had a choice, you used to tell Enya during the ending theme song. She would’ve stopped crying by then. The boy could’ve disentangled himself from the story. The Hegemon-King Bids His Lady Farewell was only a play, nothing more. If he could’ve detached himself from the play, it would’ve saved him.

She only shook her head. 不瘋魔不成活. If you don’t go insane, you don’t survive.

What?

Do you see? He was mourning. He had to become someone else, someone within another story, so his grief wasn’t his own.

That’s silly, you said. Then nothing was his own—his love, his hate.

She shrugged. So maybe he had nothing, to begin with.

Now, you watch the boy’s last act as someone else. A sword flashes across the stage and leaves behind bloody blossoms on Lady Yu’s neck as she convinces herself to die for a man who doesn’t love her back. In every rendition of this play, the year is 202 BC, and Lady Yu dies for the Hegemon King. The vibrant curtains close and so does the boy’s role, but this is an opera within a movie, and so the tragedy continues. The boy is not Lady Yu but Cheng Dieyi, but he still cuts his throat for a man who doesn't love him back, on the stage he loves the most; and as the film ends, you know that ten years later Cheng Dieyi’s actor will also die, and that ten years after that, a part of you will also die.

Enya is right: it’s one life within another, one death within another, like these wooden Matryoshka dolls nestled so tightly into each other you’d think they’re one whole. Cheng Dieyi died alongside Lady Yu. Ten years later on April first, Cheng’s actor threw himself off the 24th floor of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel because some part of him had died alongside Cheng. Ten years after that, in the AC-less basement of a shabby apartment in Kowloon, you mourn Leslie Cheung and think of breaking up with your girlfriend.

The TV screen fades to black. You rewind the movie once more, waiting for Enya to come home.

***

***

***

Back to: Issue Seven

Next: Kaiser Louis

Back to: Issue Seven

Next: Jacqueline Xiong

Back to: Issue Seven

Next: Daniel Liu

It was the summer that dead things came back to life. When his mother’s bridal gown surrendered to the smoke in Jing’s backyard, he wound up the film camera beneath his thumb and shot me in front of the fire. White lace folded in the heat. Midnight grasshoppers sang in the undergrowth. He took another picture, this time of the scalloped sweetheart neckline alone crumpling into the breeze. Jing promised me that what he was doing wasn’t wrong, that what remained of his mother’s charmeuse satin in the thick air was about creation, not vengeance, that if he could make new art from this burning garment then it was worth it, and I believed him because he had a toothy grin that unwrapped itself over neat rows of lawn, because I was a boy with too few friends, because I was seventeen.

When his mother was seventeen, she had bought the dress in a thrift store in Sunset Park. She told me this once over a pitcher of sweet tea with ginger, that it had been a soft ochre before it was dry-cleaned and renewed and worn on her wedding day. Her voice was shrill and unbearable, the kind that wilted peonies and scared away dogs, unlike her son’s, which was careful and earthly.

Jing smiled brightly at the pyre. The reason he set fire to her wedding dress was not that he hated his mother but instead, he told me, because he was determined to make art. On the stark white walls of his bedroom upstairs, there were dozens of sets of photographs, each having an image entrapping an object and another image with its smoldering remains.

Sometimes they were his own, a childhood train, a novel he had never read. Three of the sets were objects of mine, a deflated soccer ball, a pair of white socks, a copy of a magazine. Since I always ended up witnessing the fiery ritual anyway and didn’t have much besides the object itself to lose, I thought it might as well have been something of mine that he burned, something that I had a memory of. But memory didn’t work in this way. Memory created its own hurts and contours, its own body. I imagined Jing’s mother knew this, always threatening to break his 35mm SLR camera. I imagined she was afraid of what it could capture: her fingers around a green bottle, the purple marks I had seen before on Jing.

On the trimmed grass, he stretched his long arms and turned his head toward me. His dimples were in full display, despite how the only light remaining was from inside the house, now that the gasoline-stained liturgy had gone out. His hands fell to his sides. The heavy heads of the flowers in his mother’s garden beds arched back into the soil it stemmed from. Everything was heavier when it was alive.

I followed him as he took a seat on the patio floor right next to the garden table and chair. From his pocket, he pulled out the lighter he had used on the wedding dress and also a pack of Marlboros that we had stolen from the gas station by a Buddhist temple his mother frequented. I didn’t smoke, only he did, but I took one anyway, because I was seventeen, and lit the white tip. He looked at me disparagingly. Sorry, I said. That I grabbed one. That I can’t do more to help you.

He didn’t move. Instead, he pointed out gently that I had lit the wrong end. I gave the lighter back to him and tossed the failed attempt to the ground and crushed it under my shoe. The shadows we made looked bruised, hazy by the bamboo shades that separated what was outside and the warm house, too amorphous to be ours.

He closed his fist around the pocket lighter, strangled the plastic. He brought his knees up to his chin. There was a mole there, and I had joked before that his mole was like a navigational star, and that if he followed it, maybe it would take him to his real mother. He had kept a stone face then and I didn’t really understand the gravity of what I said, only speaking what had crossed my mind. I had never seen him cry, but I imagined on that night that he did, even going as far as to think about his mother crying too on the other side of his always-locked bedroom door, two wails an inch apart and still full of distance. The day after, when he picked me up in his gray sedan, I told him the part where I felt guilty and where I was sorry, and he smiled it off and gripped the steering wheel tighter, the faux leather already coming off.

Now on the cold stone floor, where he sat in front of me, he took the cigarette out of his mouth and held it loosely, and I placed my hand on his torso where there was a tattoo of an animal, or an idea, or a man. He didn’t care for permanent things, he had told me this before. He had expected things to fall apart. But there, on the flagstone paving, he admitted to this one attempt at perseverance, something he made that no one could ever take away from him, something that would always stay and could not stop loving him, could not throw plates at him, could not die in an accident, could not become a cut-out space on a family portrait, could not change, could not break, could not leave him, even if this permanent thing was on his own skin.

He climbed over me and kissed my forehead. It was the end of June, and I didn’t know a name for myself then, only a brief mindless word the world had associated with me, but now, with him renaming me, releasing me, I could answer him calling out to me. He stepped back and let his hand hover over the shutter release of his camera. This time, as he shot me, there was no fire involved, only a bright flash.

***

Back to: Issue Seven

Next: Ai Li Feng