"Everything" by Jane Wong

Everything
by Jane Wong

I am the type to go to bed with my feet dirty


A man calling from a balcony is not to be trusted


In 1988, the nation sings a song I can’t understand but I sing it 
because everyone looks at me like a thief and no one likes a thief


Algae gather in plastic cups along the Jersey Shore


The dull prongs of a fork still count as a weapon


I gather plastic cups along the shore and shake them out to use for tea, juice, a home for my toothbrush


The pledge of allegiance is a building ledge, an alleged crime, a leg crossed over another leg, a plea gone askew, a glance shared in a room with someone else who looks like you


Hundreds of toxic wild boars are roaming across northern Japan and it would be a mistake to identify with them


In 1960, my grandmother holds no knife in no tall wheat


When washing her feet, my grandmother tells me she spent decades without shoes, wonders if the mud misses her


When we look at each other, we also look away, knowingly


I am a good daughter and I can repeat this indefinitely without 
taking a breath


Often, I call out to myself just to hear an echo, to hear something moving in the walls like a healthy family of rats


My mother has been told, repeatedly: “You cannot walk here”


Here is a white stone, a white fence, a white seagull, a white jug of milk, a white candle, a white duvet, a white patio, a white bar of soap to wash your mouth out


Sometimes I dream in Cantonese and I have no idea what is being said


You grow to love what you create, pouring out of your mouth


In 1988, my father sees his reflection in the rearview mirror and identifies with the blood moon lighting his way to Atlantic City


From a balcony, a man yells at me: “You need some white dick” and I turn into a boar


我 在 广 东 做 梦


My father disappears for weeks and my mother keeps weeding the garden, pulling cigarettes from the splintering tomatoes I will devour


I study asymptotes for months and dream in curves — almost but never touching


My mother writes in her English diary for night school: “I hate him I hate him I hate him I hate him I” and her ESL teacher only gives her a check, so I give her a check plus


To be a good daughter means to carry everything with you at all times, the luggage of the past lifted to the mouth


When we look at each other, my mother laughs like an overripe tomato on a windowsill


In 1989, I spent months assembling a puzzle map of the United States of America and the teacher said, “Good job, Jane” and then louder and slower like a drowning sloth: “Gooooood jooooob, Jane” and I did not touch a single piece


Bloody drunk and a blood moon, my father fights with another gambler and jabs at his arm with a dull fork and they both laugh celestially


你 是 一 只 美 丽 的 野 猪


During elementary school, I did not say a single word, not even when called on, and thus the teachers and administrators 
decided I could not speak English because they looked at me


Mao Zedong explains math: “In geometry, I just drew a picture of an egg — that was enough geometry for me”


My grandfather was jailed by the Red Army sometime between 1966 and 1976 and my mother says: “I saw him cry when I tried to visit. He wanted to eat the bao I made for him”


Algae gather, gleaming like jewels, on the head of my 5th grade betta fish


Counterrevolutionaries during the Cultural Revolution are likened to “finding a bone inside an egg”


I was born, healthy, in the year of the rat


The man on the balcony invests in a foldable set of two chairs and one table in eggshell white — mold resistant, perfect for outdoor use


你 不 敢 看 我


I was ten when I willed a rock to fall off a ledge, just by staring at it long enough






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"Effort at Speech Between Two People" by Muriel Rukeyser

Effort at Speech Between Two People
by Muriel Rukeyser


:  Speak to me.          Take my hand.            What are you now?
   I will tell you all.          I will conceal nothing.
   When I was three, a little child read a story about a rabbit
   who died, in the story, and I crawled under a chair    :
   a pink rabbit    :    it was my birthday, and a candle
   burnt a sore spot on my finger, and I was told to be happy.

:  Oh, grow to know me.        I am not happy.        I will be open:
   Now I am thinking of white sails against a sky like music,
   like glad horns blowing, and birds tilting, and an arm about me.
   There was one I loved, who wanted to live, sailing.

:  Speak to me.        Take my hand.        What are you now?
   When I was nine, I was fruitily sentimental,
   fluid    :    and my widowed aunt played Chopin,
   and I bent my head on the painted woodwork, and wept.
   I want now to be close to you.        I would
   link the minutes of my days close, somehow, to your days.

:  I am not happy.          I will be open.
   I have liked lamps in evening corners, and quiet poems.
   There has been fear in my life.          Sometimes I speculate
   On what a tragedy his life was, really.

:  Take my hand.          Fist my mind in your hand.          What are you now?
   When I was fourteen, I had dreams of suicide,
   and I stood at a steep window, at sunset, hoping toward death   :
   if the light had not melted clouds and plains to beauty,
   if light had not transformed that day, I would have leapt.
   I am unhappy.          I am lonely.          Speak to me.

:  I will be open.          I think he never loved me:
   He loved the bright beaches, the little lips of foam
   that ride small waves, he loved the veer of gulls:
   he said with a gay mouth: I love you.          Grow to know me.

:  What are you now?          If we could touch one another,
   if these our separate entities could come to grips,
   clenched like a Chinese puzzle . . . yesterday
   I stood in a crowded street that was live with people,
   and no one spoke a word, and the morning shone.
   Everyone silent, moving. . . . Take my hand.          Speak to me.






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"Wash of Cold River" by H. D.

Wash of Cold River
By H. D.

Wash of cold river
in a glacial land,
Ionian water,
chill, snow-ribbed sand,
drift of rare flowers,
clear, with delicate shell-
like leaf enclosing
frozen lily-leaf,
camellia texture,
colder than a rose;

wind-flower
that keeps the breath
of the north-wind—
these and none other;

intimate thoughts and kind
reach out to share
the treasure of my mind,
intimate hands and dear
drawn garden-ward and sea-ward
all the sheer rapture
that I would take
to mould a clear
and frigid statue;

rare, of pure texture,
beautiful space and line,
marble to grace
your inaccessible shrine.

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"Spring in Belfast" by Derek Mahon

Spring in Belfast
by Derek Mahon

Walking among my own this windy morning
In a tide of sunlight between shower and shower,
I resume my old conspiracy with the wet
Stone and the unwieldy images of the squinting heart.
Once more, as before, I remember not to forget.

There is a perverse pride in being on the side
Of the fallen angels and refusing to get up.
We could all be saved by keeping an eye on the hill
At the top of every street, for there it is,
Eternally, if irrelevantly, visible —

But yield instead to the humorous formulae,
The spurious mystery in the knowing nod;
Or we keep sullen silence in light and shade,
Rehearsing our astute salvations under
The cold gaze of a sanctimonious God.

One part of my mind must learn to know its place.
The things that happen in the kitchen houses
And echoing back streets of this desperate city
Should engage more than my casual interest,
Exact more interest than my casual pity.






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"Earth's Answer" by William Blake

Earth's Answer
by William Blake

Earth rais'd up her head, 
From the darkness dread & drear. 
Her light fled: 
Stony dread! 
And her locks cover'd with grey despair. 

Prison'd on watry shore 
Starry Jealousy does keep my den 
Cold and hoar 
Weeping o'er 
I hear the Father of the ancient men 

Selfish father of men 
Cruel, jealous, selfish fear 
Can delight 
Chain'd in night 
The virgins of youth and morning bear. 

Does spring hide its joy 
When buds and blossoms grow? 
Does the sower? 
Sow by night? 
Or the plowman in darkness plow? 

Break this heavy chain, 
That does freeze my bones around 
Selfish! vain! 
Eternal bane! 
That free Love with bondage bound. 

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"A Map to the Next World" by Joy Harjo

A Map to the Next World
by Joy Harjo

for Desiray Kierra Chee

In the last days of the fourth world I wished to make a map for
those who would climb through the hole in the sky.

My only tools were the desires of humans as they emerged
from the killing fields, from the bedrooms and the kitchens.

For the soul is a wanderer with many hands and feet.

The map must be of sand and can’t be read by ordinary light. It
must carry fire to the next tribal town, for renewal of spirit.

In the legend are instructions on the language of the land, how it
was we forgot to acknowledge the gift, as if we were not in it or of it.

Take note of the proliferation of supermarkets and malls, the
altars of money. They best describe the detour from grace.

Keep track of the errors of our forgetfulness; the fog steals our
children while we sleep.

Flowers of rage spring up in the depression. Monsters are born
there of nuclear anger.

Trees of ashes wave good-bye to good-bye and the map appears to
disappear.

We no longer know the names of the birds here, how to speak to
them by their personal names.

Once we knew everything in this lush promise.

What I am telling you is real and is printed in a warning on the
map. Our forgetfulness stalks us, walks the earth behind us, leav-
ing a trail of paper diapers, needles, and wasted blood.

An imperfect map will have to do, little one.

The place of entry is the sea of your mother’s blood, your father’s
small death as he longs to know himself in another.

There is no exit.

The map can be interpreted through the wall of the intestine—a
spiral on the road of knowledge.

You will travel through the membrane of death, smell cooking
from the encampment where our relatives make a feast of fresh
deer meat and corn soup, in the Milky Way.

They have never left us; we abandoned them for science.

And when you take your next breath as we enter the fifth world
there will be no X, no guidebook with words you can carry.

You will have to navigate by your mother’s voice, renew the song
she is singing.

Fresh courage glimmers from planets.

And lights the map printed with the blood of history, a map you
will have to know by your intention, by the language of suns.

When you emerge note the tracks of the monster slayers where they
entered the cities of artificial light and killed what was killing us.

You will see red cliffs. They are the heart, contain the ladder.

A white deer will greet you when the last human climbs from the
destruction.

Remember the hole of shame marking the act of abandoning our
tribal grounds.

We were never perfect.

Yet, the journey we make together is perfect on this earth who was
once a star and made the same mistakes as humans.

We might make them again, she said.

Crucial to finding the way is this: there is no beginning or end.

You must make your own map.

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"Our Nature" by Rae Armantrout

Our Nature
by Rae Armantrout

The very flatness 
of portraits
makes for nostalgia
in the connoisseur.

Here’s the latest
little lip of wave
to flatten
and spread thin.

Let’s say
it shows our recklessness,

our fast gun,

our self-consciousness
which was really

our infatuation
with our own fame,

our escapes,

the easy way
we’d blend in

with the peasantry,

our loyalty
to our old gang

from among whom
it was our nature

to be singled out






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