WRITING
ONLINE
2 Poems in Connotation Press (2011)
"The Sea Wall" in The Collagist (2011)
"Migration" reprinted in East West Poetry (2011)
3 poems in Town Creek Poetry (2010)
"In Us the Unused" in Stone's Throw Magazine (2010)
"What You Saw" on Poetry Daily (2010)
2 poems in Blackbird (2010)
"History Filled In" reprinted in 3 Quarks Daily (2010)
"Giving" in Cha: An Asian Literary Magazine (2009)
"The Voice Before" in The Greensboro Review (2008)
5 poems in Poetry Now (2004)
poems from Each Crumbling House
Guangdong, China, 2001
Your mythology of memory
forgets and lies.
Memory makes ghosts
grow shadows.
We stand where your brother
in sleeves of blood
slaughtered the oldest water buffalo.
Sweat stabs his eyes and he looks
as though he mourns the beast.
When you tell, you hold
history between your teeth
ready to swallow.
And here your mother shed
her jewelry for a small man to
smuggle you both to Hong Kong.
She gives him everything, then touches
the jade sewn into her shirt.
The stone beats
fast against her finger.
I knew every telling before we
came to Guangdong, have for
so long braced them
in the scaffolding of my voice.
If you could see them now,
each crumbling house
I have already rebuilt.
"Each Crumbling House" was first published in Crab Orchard Review.
*
How summer oppresses after I have survived
a winter’s small threats of snow. I want, every
moment, to be elsewhere,
this cage too small to open my arms.
We have lived here three years, good
ones that led to marriage, all the while
knowing we will never live
here again. I have grown love
over tables and fields
I do not love, grown into love under cicada wind
tossing us all night.
How easily we live in preparation and just until,
how worn the path of prologue. And how
little changes. Is it now grass or grave beneath us?
Are we grain or pearl or urchin bone?
How summer pours out our skin.
How we thirst while we drink.
*
WEDDING DAY
The stories say we come out of chaos.
In one, Pan Ku dies and bleeds
the world forth.
His knees form mountains and sweat pours rivers.
Chaos of the body.
In another, we are divided first
from darkness, then water,
cleaved from the void
into a likeness that is good.
We have no choice but flesh:
before the world, a body. If we are
clayed from the earth, we are bowels
and lice.
So we marry in a garden.
If, already in us, another’s vessels
and sinew open
into branch and blade,
if our mouths fill with dirt and we lie down,
this garden will hold
what world comes.
Fields quiver before rain.
We, too.
*
A FISH IN PRAIRIE
The story I tell is a fish
gaping its gills in my hands.
The only place I have
to set it down is prairie.
My mother has the pond.
I have no hands to dig a well
or farm the rain.
This is how you breathe, little carp.
Little bones and brittle eyes,
I would swallow you.
I would melt my body, so
full of water, to house you.
Why you will not swim in the air,
will not take from my lungs’
spidering blood.
Why you insist on lying
down in grass
to drown us both.
"A Fish in Prairie" first appeared in Red Rock Review.
*
WHAT YOU REMEMBER
Kowloon, Hong Kong, 2001
In the cramped city, we bargain
with our clumsy Hong Kong Cantonese.
You do not tell me the names of streets
or the best places to eat.
You do not remember the sound of tide
at the wall of the city.
All you have told me of Hong Kong
is that once you lived here.
What you remember most is leaving.
On our last day in Kowloon, we share
a plate of wine-soaked chicken
and greens in the hotel café.
Our bags bulge with the sweet, sticky lychees
we have become addicted to, and gifts
for the children in your village.
Tomorrow in Canton we will give them away
and touch hands in the exchange.
I will not remember how to say
the simplest words to them.
You will remind me that I, too, speak Cantonese
like a child. And you, only a little better.
The words you have not forgotten: China,
revolution, ocean, daughter.
"What You Remember" first appeared in Zone 3.
*
