1. atlantis
There is a particular kind of haunting
that happens in fiber-glass cables under the sea,
but that is another kingdom, not mine—
my genealogy has no atlantis.
The cloud is the residence of the intermittently forsaken
because there is something strange and comforting
in the insistent aching of censored characters and
pornographic punctuation,
something that
lingers, I think, in ones and zeros
and the empty frames of matrices
that are not so different from the empty frames of a Chinatown fenced and eaten, land speculation a carnivorous thing that drove us away for parking lots and towers that are knocked down by airplanes gone askew in their continental pathways.
Our promised land is, after all,
a distillation of yawns, piss, and tears that never made it to the ocean,
where the pixel is a discrete unit and there is no need for
something as complex as
pain because the incense has been
burnt and
our ancestors are already mourning.
There is no need for something called forgiveness
when all this has been said, and more,
in an infinity of self-replicating digits
that grieve in silence across the pacific.
2. new year
swanlings drown when paper lanterns are lit
because this must be the season of intonation. I know because
I cannot sit anymore in his printer cartridge without
getting a sunburn—things I have outgrown
are sooner left ahead of time
but I am still waiting for him to remember.
the windchimes at the door are clinking and
a strange déjà vu is quivering in the air. but it’s only me
living what I never remembered which is also what
I never re-membered, as if my limbs were not
puzzle pieces and my fingers were not tang-hu-lu
leaving streaks behind in the grain of his ink.
but a heart is just an online payment of a single cent.
a completed action is potentially atomized and
necessarily an intersection, the type with
traffic lights that flash red and blue and silver,
like the webbing of a spiderweb. I know all this
but still I cannot help but think of how
a hundred years ago
and a thousand girls ago I told him
that there is some romance you cannot see
in the ten thousand leagues
of my fishtank.
3. [4].
fill in the blank:
______ your sadness.
A. 洗掉
B. 吃
C. murder
D. all of the above
I cannot circle the right answer if
you do not know what it means.
The lines of my palm are a polynomial function
and an old man told me you will never escape your oscillating body
even if the oceans are drained.
4. black hole
I wonder what would happen if you put a candle in a black hole. Some sort of vortex would emerge, I imagine, an implosion of light particles that travel in chiasmatic orbits.
5. we are made of tiny revolutions
On the left side of my ribs I have tattooed the Chinese characters 革命.This means “revolution.” In China this phrase carries an intractable stigma—the characters call to mind Mao’s Cultural Revolution and the mass murder and destruction that came with it. So I am careful to keep it covered when I walk the streets of Beijing. This is also the reason why, when my parents first saw the ink on my ribs, they paled the same shade of the flour that sits in our kitchen cabinet. What do you mean by this, child? they asked me. They asked what are you waiting for? I said I don’t know. I don’t know.
革命 is a strikingly beautiful phrase that does not betray the horror of its historical application. In one sense it means revolution. In another, it means to put your life on the line. In one sense I want a political revolution. The sort that will instantly and tracelessly wipe this world of its wounds. But that kind of revolution can never, will never, happen. In another sense, I want to put my life on the line. In every moment, a revolution. A personal, small revolution.
I am waiting for a revolution, I think. That’s what I might be waiting for.
I am waiting for the future, I think. In each moment. That’s what I might be waiting for.
Yesterday a friend told me they were born on the cusp of revolution. I asked which revolution. He said the cusp of revolution is the time cusping the Scorpio-Sagittarius cluster, silly. Not a real revolution.
I, too, was born on the cusp of Revolution. Not the time cusping the Scorpio-Sagittarius cluster, but a real revolution. I was born at a time of my mother’s revolt. But my birth quickly quelled that rebellion. Like a tide, I washed out onto the hospital bed and like a tide, the revolution washed over and out of her.
That was my inheritance.
Not our inheritance.
The first thing we do when we come into the world is wound our mothers. In order to come into life we must first indelibly wound our mothers. That is a pattern that is then continued for the rest of our lives. We continually wound our mothers, our parents, the ones that love us. With our unintentional carelessness with our bodies and words. We are all just kids.
We do not realize that a cut on our body could murder our parents, so we play and we fall again and again and again. And they are not there to catch us every time but they are always there to see the aftermath. They are always there to nurse the wound, oblivious of the fact that it has not healed, no, it has only transferred from body to body, with love.
Genealogical transmittance is bidirectional. That, we should never forget.
6. anatomical structure of my eyes
On this beach there are countless tiny pebbles that break the smooth melancholia of the sand, which is grey. This unremarkable flat grey tone has morphed into a startling black in the evening light. I’ve never seen very well in the dark; to me, the grains of sand that rest on my feet—the earth that I sink into now—are pitch black, like tar or coal or other kinds of blacks so dark as to physically remove surrounding light particles. I feel as if I am standing in a black hole.
A sky at eight in the evening will test my vision. I must be particularly maladapted to survival, because things in the dark appear to my eyes as they do to a low quality phone camera—grainy, indeterminate. It’s like seeing white noise. It pains me to know this, because there must be so many visions I am now missing.
It is approximately ten o’six in the evening.
There is nothing in the skies for me to see. There are no stars in my eyes, despite the pristineness of the land I now occupy and the unambiguous lack of city lights. There is no light pollution; the only thing clouding the stars in the sky are invisible cataracts in my eyes. I stare so hard my eyeballs feel as if they might become dislocated from their respective sockets, and still, there are no stars.
Nothing seems complete at this moment, not even the darkness of the heavens above me. Unphysical things commit strange acts to my body. What the sky is doing now is taking away both my vision and my dark. I cannot see the stars and yet, things are light around me. Except the sand. That’s the deepest of blacks. But the sky—the sky is lit. It’s an eerie sight to behold, a result of the failure of my eyes. I swear there are tiny analog cameras in my eyes, ones that auto-adjust to different brightness settings involuntarily and shoddily, so that this dark, starry sky now appears a grainy grey gradient. It is hard to describe the particular disquietude of never knowing true darkness.
7. we were both young
He touches me with forensic precision, gentle
the way a cicada brushes its wings against the tree it eats, intent
the way a mathematician presses his chalk into fine bread.
Ashes are scattering in the wind with the leaves,
which twist and contort in patterns I thought only my spine was capable of tracing,
constellations that map, exact, onto the footprints I left behind,
thick with the grief and humiliation of an abandoned child or that of
a buddha who has put his flesh on the scale for a demon to consume,
a sacrifice he made to save a dove,
which was me. And so I hid under his sleeve as he weighed
his flesh, pound by pound, in offering.
And so I watched as even his bones were not spared
and at last he knelt and I knelt beside him, brittle,
and not crying.
Like this I sat, knees crumbling beneath me,
toes crushed to marble, as piece after piece of my gentle king
was pressed to his lips,
red cubes glinting in the starlight, the buddha
fuming with cosmic relief and murderous generosity, the devil
smiling softly, and still, I do not cry.
It is only when he lays his fingers on my chin,
pressed flowers between velvet lips, a dot of perfume planted between my eyes,
that an ocean swells with shameful vengeance and stretches my world in horizontal.
This eternity is when a devil or maybe a young psychedelic god
kisses me on the lips, gaze gentle.
His lips land—tasting like dead buddha and
the leaves of a sacred tree—and I let myself cry. I do not know
if the tears falling are mine or his,
salt brine embalming conjoined lips.
I let myself cry and scatter in the wind, bits of skin carried away
in the same slow, torpedic motion of a medieval buddha’s swirling guts.
8. define: Here
The knowledge of the exact digit description of your youth will end you—to know that this is not your last time under this same sun will be more than you can bear. What does it mean when acceleration erases existence? What does it mean to be here, to exist, always? Here is a desperate thing between your heart and mine, who forgets the impossibility of simultaneously existing and being sad, but remembers always the necessity of melancholia. Here is a fragile thing in your hands who trembles and trembles at the might of her own significance, who is so afraid of breaking that infinite machines have been assembled for her preservation, GPS programs coded to pinpoint her exact coordinates on a flat Cartesian plane, yet somehow she is still lost. I have waded through time at the same objective pace in search of Here and now for eons, and still I have not found her. I have looked and looked and stripped myself naked, quivering in the shower—a vector field of linearly configured teardrops and understated anxiety—and Here is always present and never found. This simultaneous presence and un-presence of Here, they call Youth.
9. zoom confessions
There are faces watching me watch back but
I cannot see a single one—they are all
surface effects now, scattering glitter that catches
in my hair and the crevices of my skin
gripping tight to my sweaty hands which are
gripped tight to the table top. You are saying
something about eschatological fear and my soul,
something important about my soul and
I must not miss it but all I can see is glitter in the air,
glitter everywhere and my fingers glued to the table,
pressed gemstones embedded in the lines of my
palm, carving hieroglyphs between the table
and the heel of my hand and you do not even know that already
the contours of your face have vaporized and
congealed three and a half times and are stuck
now as rubies beading on my palm. You are saying
something complex about this man or another
who said something important about my soul
that I know is of some vague import and that I should
probably hold on to but how can I when already
you are rippling into the glittering air, pollen,
it’s spring, and when I sneeze, suddenly
you have collected your atomized body again
into a small tessellated screen, this is the
fourth time this happens. You are not the only
thing that dissolves into visible particulate matter
because your words have also started beading
across my face and I am sitting, fingertips still
crushed flat to wood, breathing heavily, when
I am struck by how similar you are to the bee on the
windowscreen and in that instant I know that
I have gained something precious in losing the
knowledge of my soul and there is no essential difference
between a philosopher and a drone.