Oculus
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WHITE the color of the man washed ashore, from his shirt to his pants to his brittle shoes
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OCULUS
Also by Sally Wen Mao
Mad Honey Symposium
OCULUS
POEMS
Sally Wen Mao
Graywolf Press
Copyright © 2019 by Sally Wen Mao
The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.
This book is made possible through a partnership with the College of Saint Benedict, and honors the legacy of S. Mariella Gable, a distinguished teacher at the College. Support has been provided by the Manitou Fund as part of the Warner Reading Program.
Special funding for this title was provided by the Jerome Foundation.
Published by Graywolf Press
250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600
Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401
All rights reserved.
www.graywolfpress.org
Published in the United States of America
ISBN 978-1-55597-825-9
Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-874-7
2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1
First Graywolf Printing, 2019
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018947076
Cover design: Jeenee Lee Design
Cover art: Sally Wen Mao
for all my sisters
Contents
Ghost Story
Oculus
Occidentalism
Teledildonics
Mutant Odalisque
Live Feed
No Resolution
Provenance: A Vivisection
/ // ///
The Toll of the Sea
Anna May Wong on Silent Films
Anna May Wong Fans Her Time Machine
Anna May Wong Goes Home with Bruce Lee
Anna May Wong Has Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Anna May Wong Blows Out Sixteen Candles
/ // ///
Antipode Essay
Close Encounters of the Liminal Kind
Electronic Motherland
The Mongolian Cow Sour Yogurt Super Voice Girl
Electronic Necropolis
Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles
The Diary of Afong Moy
/ // ///
Anna May Wong Meets Josephine Baker
Anna May Wong Makes Cameos
Anna May Wong Rates the Runway
Anna May Wong Dreams of Wong Kar-Wai
Anna May Wong Stars as Cyborg #86
Anna May Wong Goes Viral
/ // ///
Ghost in the Shell
Dirge with Cutlery and Furs
Yume Miru Kikai [The Dreaming Machine]
The Five Faces of Faye Valentine
Lavender Town
The Death of Ruan Lingyu
After Nam June Paik
Oculus
/ // ///
Resurrection
Notes
Acknowledgments
“An eye on film, affixed to an unconscious body. The eye sees nothing for the camera has already robbed it of vision …
It isn’t possible to reconstruct a story from this landscape of ruins.”
—Yoko Tawada, The Naked Eye
“It is on the stage of contaminated desires that we are most pressed to reconsider the politics of recognition.”
—Anne Anlin Cheng, Second Skin
OCULUS
Ghost Story
Forgive me if the wind stole
the howl from my mouth and whipped
it against your windowpanes.
When I lived, I wanted to be seen.
I built this mansion made of windows
for my prince and me. He feinted,
I knocked—we were apparitions of splendor.
Our dining hall was the Santa Maria Novella.
Our bedroom was the Izumo Shrine.
Our study, a study in tension. Books slid
off the buttresses. We bluffed a life together
on this mattress. When I kissed him,
I kissed a marble statue. It was Apollo,
it was Krishna, it was Ra. Monitor lizards
wandered through the empty halls.
The pianola a stronghold for tarantulas.
We relied on our plasma television
to pull us back to the world again.
Downstairs, the curtains parted, exposing
us to the wolves above. We beamed
our searchlights onto them. Soon
a Technicolor wilderness surrounded
us. Turquoise stags watched us shave
with electric razors. We built new barricades
between ourselves. Our bathroom,
a wallpaper of scars. After he fled
the premises, I unearthed my binoculars
before the mansion was razed. That was the last
time I trusted a body that touched me.
All a ghost wants is to be chained
to a place, to someone who can’t forget
her. Every day I try to fight my own
brokenness. But once you are forgotten,
it’s not so bad: a heart broken
joins another chorus. Can you hear
the chorus speak? Can you bear
it? The words of apparitions do not belong
to a language. They flit over pines, meaningless,
and shed their skins in your hands.
Oculus
Before I wake, I peruse the dead girl’s live
photo feed. Days ago, she uploaded
her confessions: I can’t bear the sorrow
captions her black eyes, gaps across a face
luminescent as snow. I can’t bear the snow—
how it falls, swells over the bridges,
under my clothes, yet I can’t be held
or beheld here, in this barren warren,
this din of ruined objects, peepholes into boring
scandals. Stockings roll high past hems
as I watch the videos of her boyfriend, cooing:
behave, darling, so I can make you my wife.
How the dead girl fell, awaiting a hand to hold,
eyes to behold her as the lights clicked on
and she posed for her picture, long eyelashes
all wet, legs tapered, bright as thorns.
Her windows overlook Shanghai, curtains drawn
to cast a shadow over the Huangpu River,
frozen this year into a dry, bloodless
stalk. Why does the light in the night
promise so much? She wiped her lens
before she died. The smudge still lives.
I saw it singe the edge of her b
ed.
Soon it swallowed the whole burning city.
Occidentalism
A man celebrates erstwhile conquests,
his book locked in a silo, still in print.
I scribble, make Sharpie lines, deface
its text like it defaces me. Outside, grain
fields whisper. Marble lions are silent
yet silver-tongued, with excellent teeth.
In this life I have worshipped so many lies.
Then I workshop them, make them better.
An East India Company, an opium trade,
a war, a treaty, a concession, an occupation,
a man parting the veil covering a woman’s
face, his nails prying her lips open. I love
the fragility of a porcelain bowl. How easy
it is, to shatter chinoiserie, like the Han
dynasty urn Ai Weiwei dropped in 1995.
If only recovering the silenced history
is as simple as smashing its container: book,
bowl, celadon spoon. Such objects cross
borders the way our bodies never could.
Instead, we’re left with history, its blonde
dust. That bowl is unbreakable. All its ghosts
still shudder through us like small breaths.
The tome of hegemony lives on, circulates
in our libraries, in our bloodstreams. One day,
a girl like me may come across it on a shelf,
pick it up, read about all the ways her body
is a thing. And I won’t be there to protect
her, to cross the text out and say: go ahead—
rewrite this.
Teledildonics
haptic
touches flare little moths
or schisms
faraway clavicles ribs
a pornography live
through open
electrodes
touch your internet through your clothes
kinesthetic sand
for kinesthetic toes
kinesthetically fucked
next to the lifeless reefs
palm trees
chafe the skin
maybe I’ll spend the rest
of my life
with my remote control
under the never-ending sun
the never-fallow
the never-breaking
paradisiacal goggles
my VR headset
newest stereoscope
for our millennium
we’ll live and love forever
by the sea that will never drown us
in the wellness shore
and the undulating rice fields
where all touch gives pleasure
all touch is welcome
and nothing will hurt
and nothing will bruise
Mutant Odalisque
This is not an ode. February’s ice razor scalps
the gingko trees, their hair pulled skyward
like the ombre roots
of young women. March harrows
us mottled girls. Vernal equinox:
a hare harries the chicks, hurries
behind wet haystacks. Livestock.
Gnats. The glue-traps are gone.
March, ladies. March for your dignity.
March for your happiness. March, a muss
of lidless eyes. In the forest, a handsome man pisses,
puissant, luminary’s ink leaking on trees.
Penury I furl into the craven lens, in its mirror, a pulse:
webcam where I kiss my witnesses.
They watch and watch and watch the butcher
cut, the surgeon mend, they watch the glade
of crushed femora, they watch my dorsal fin,
they watch my scales dart across the cutting
board. They watch the way I open, flinch, bent
against the wind that beheads the nimbuses.
Or April’s turning toward ecstatic sob—departure.
Networks freeze, all sloe, all ice. Transmitters
falter. The cicatrix soaped, cilia and pus
rubbed raw. No machine. I dare
my witnesses to stick their pencils on me.
Do they marvel at a conquest—
blue flesh and gills. Do they think of me as soiled
or new soil. Do they take notes in their medical
journals. Am I their inspiration—O Vesalius, god
of anatomy, is that why they ask so softly for my name.
Live Feed
After I am dead, I will hunt you
day and night. Pixelated ghosts
will haunt your ears. Trees will crack
under my digital weight.
In a minute my arrest
will go live, handcuff you to your bed.
It’s starting: I watch you watch me.
I watch you lurk me, my starling,
it rolls: I’m the beggar. I shake the train—
gyrate, move, bare my shoulders, they come
for me, jostle and flay.
I am a fish and a pariah
drying in my oubliette.
Release me—share me, my shards
and my innards—
reduce me to a watering hole
for your thirst. Thrash
against my pincers. Undo
yourself, let the oculus
burn through my clothes, record
every mistake I make.
I feed you my limbs
in this glass container. I limn
you with this fodder
and you taste.
No Resolution
In December 2012, a father from Queens, Ki Suk Han, was pushed into the train tracks of an oncoming Q train.
This poem is for his daughter, Ashley Han.
The cover of the magazine. I throw it open.
I throw it out. THIS MAN, announces
the headline. THIS MAN IS ABOUT TO—
Blood broadcasts the story. Noise rakes
the story and pummels it to the ground
until there’s nothing left. No story. No man.
No wife and daughter, no life in Queens.
His daughter doesn’t speak. She closes
her eyes, and her lids sear the whites beneath.
At the press conference, she hides her hands
inside her hoodie. All the cameras. They point,
they shoot—she reels, she shatters.
A year later I will meet her. We will walk down West 4th,
MacDougal, under the arches on a crisp
October day. We will eat crepes in the East Village,
watch a man play piano in the square.
She will talk about her father—the story
of all our lives—how she didn’t have the chance
to connect with him fully, and then suddenly—
it was the story of none of our lives—
and she was 21, an only child, with her father’s
fate on a magazine cover, piled in grocery
stores across America, in low-res, high-res,
the pixels blurred like smudges on skin.
For now, it is December. The shadows on the platforms
elongate. I have not yet met her. I turn off the television,
afraid of its heft, its volume, its relationship to gravity.
Lately, I can’t go underground without shielding
my body with my hands. The train whines
and goes. The stories about our lives do not have faces.
Provenance: A Vivisection
“[The Bodies exhibition] is a redemocratization. The human body is the last remaining nature in a man-made environment.”
—Gunther von Hagens
I.
You, you are a factory
of muscle. You, you are an empire
of polymer. I recognize myself
in your face, your posture, your severed
epiglottis. Take it off. Take it all
off
for us to see: first the clothes,
then the epidermis, then your mouth,
your country, your context. Provenance:
a chronology of ownership—
all tautology, for none of our emissaries
have uncovered the tampered body’s
histories. The prophet calculates
the profits. Exhibit A: Hottentot Venus,
1810. Pregnant woman from village X,
reclining nude in lit interior. Excision—
watch the womb peeled back,
see what milkless plastic the baby
suckles, how he crows against the vernix
of his mother’s plastic gluetrap. Baby,
do you dream of trapezes? Baby, do
you choke on the inchoate cloud?
II.
Gunther von Hagens was born in Poland,
January 1945. That season, snow
shuddered everywhere and ashes too descended
from crematoriums onto frozen glades.
The Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet wrote
to his wife from prison: even at the dump
our atoms will fall side by side.
Tired fires cleaved through cities, rivers
choked on human glands. Hemophilia wracked
von Hagens’ childhood: blood scissored out
at every gust. Decades later, he invented
plastination to tame the rogue artery.
He became Doctor, curator of skulls,
Inventor, perfecter of preservation:
it takes three years to plastinate an elephant.
Two for a horse. Just one for a man.
III.
You, you are my clout, menagerie.
When I imagine your bedroom
positions, you will enact my fantasies.
In my dreams, I ask you to stop licking
your pelt, whip you like an elder god.
Your fats, sternums, orifices
will educate us, provide the jolt
for a Sunday afternoon. Soil
yourself and I’ll be the one to wipe you,
I’ll be the one to flense your skin.
Exhibit B: Chang and Eng, 1829.
Exhibit C: Afong Moy, 1834.
Exhibit D: Ota Benga, St. Louis