World Fair, 1904. It’s a simple
exchange. We will pay for you.
Your hanging organs—our garden.
Gelatins astound us, fill us with relief
for what we have: golden hearts
that rouge the very air around.
Lungs that breathe. Gills that sing.
We are an abattoir of gratitude.
IV.
This is a fatty market. It blooms a corpulent
flower. Body suppliers. Rafflesia. Rapeseed. Boom,
boom, drones the Dalian corpse plant. Production
line: technicians dehydrate faces, bones, cartilage,
soak the cadavers in pink effluvia.
Autopsy hour—watch the fatty tissues sap,
seep, curdle. Watch the sticky plastic pump
into their ribs, ravish them. Kiss the cadaver
with a scalpel. Knives pare their eyes. Bad pears:
cores swarm with gnats, millipedes, wormseeds.
Insects coil over their golden flesh. Their
mouths are blood diamonds. Rumor has it,
the world is gorging on Chinese secrets.
Cover this wound before the flies find it.
V.
Sir, I look at you through your vitreous blue
eyes, and your shorn life passes through me
in one thrush. Boy who flunked his college
entrance exams. Man who ate abalone
from the can. How were you punished?
With bullwhips and jellyfish stings?
You died not long ago: I can tell by the way
your ligaments curl. Have you traveled
as far in your life as you’ve toured
posthumously, torqued in a prison
of cryogenic light? Amsterdam. Paris.
New York: what does it mean, anyway—
the provenance of a corpse? Who may possess
the body—spirit, demon, man, enterprise?
You cannot exorcise the black
market from the body, though I want to smash
that slipshod glass, obliterate the price
on your head. I want to wreck the paraffin
that suspends your dancing spine in the air.
I scratch the cage, wipe your name
in pellucid bones. When they kick me
out, I search for you in my father’s face
and find you in my son’s. Pittsburgh’s
highways soliloquize your anonymity,
your face on the billboard a marvel.
You gaze at my city with your pupils
sealed. Wherever I go now, you follow.
VI.
Thief of my skin, you can arrange my bones so I fly,
a raptor—you can cure my meat, summon the flies
in summer. My body is my crypt, your masterpiece.
Turkey vultures scare the stratosphere
searching for carrion, follow the scent in my limbs,
its feral suet. My name does not end in fury.
I’d rather you blow my alien bits into a black hole
than keep me here, intact and jaundiced. So please,
I ask: incinerate me. Let the sky be my open grave.
The Toll of the Sea
The first successful two-color (red and green) Technicolor feature, a retelling of Madame Butterfly starring Anna May Wong (1922)
GREEN means go, so run—now—
GREEN the color of the siren sea, whose favors are a mortgage upon the soul
RED means stop, before the cliffs jag downward
RED the color of the shore that welcomes
WHITE the color of the man washed ashore, from his shirt to his pants to his brittle shoes
WHITE the color of the screen before Technicolor
WHITE the color of the master narrative
GREEN the color of the ocean, so kind, not leaving a stain on the white shirt
GREEN the color of the girl, so kind—but why?
She speaks: Alone in my garden I heard the cry of wind and wave
In the green girl’s garden, the stranger clamps her, asks:
How would you like to go to America? A lie, soaked in the
RED of the chokecherries that turn brown in the heat
RED the color of the roses that spy
RED the color of their fake marriage
WHITE the color of the white man’s frown
She asks: Is it great lark or great sparrow you call those good times in America?
GREEN the color of his departure
WHITE the color of the counterfeit letters she sends to herself
WHITE the color of their son
WHITE the color of erasure
RED the color of the lost footage
RED the sea that swallows our stories
RED the color of the girl who believed the roses
RED the color of the ocean that drowns the girl
RED the color of the final restoration
In every story, there is a Technicolor screen: black / white / red / green
In every story, there is a chance to restore the color
If we recover the flotsam, can we rewrite the script?
Alone in a stranger’s garden, I run—I forge a desert with my own arms
BLUE the color of our recovered narrative
BLUE the color of the siren sea, which refuses to keep a white shirt spotless
BLUE the color of our reclaimed Pacific
BLUE the ocean that drowns the liars
BLUE the shore where the girl keeps living
There she rises, on the opposite shore
There she awakens—prismatic, childless, free—
Shorn of the story that keeps her kneeling
BLUE is the opposite of sacrifice
Anna May Wong on Silent Films
It is natural to live in an era
when no one uttered—
and silence was glamour
so I could cast one glance westward
and you’d know what I was
going to kill. Murder in my gaze,
treachery in my movements:
if I bared the grooves
in my spine, made my lust known,
the reel would remind me
that someone with my face
could never be loved.
How did you expect my characters
to react? In so many shoots,
I was brandishing a dagger.
The narrative was enchanting
enough to make me believe
I, too, could live in a white
palace, smell the odorless gardens,
relieve myself on their white
petals. To be a star in Sun City—
to be first lady on the celluloid
screen—I had to marry
my own cinematic death.
I never wept audibly—I saw my
sisters in the sawmills,
reminded myself of my good luck.
Even the muzzle over my mouth
could not kill me, though I
never slept soundly through the silence.
Anna May Wong Fans Her Time Machine
I’ve tried so hard to erase myself.
That iconography—my face
in Technicolor, the manta ray
eyelashes, the nacre and chignon.
I’ll bet four limbs they’d cast me as another
Mongol slave. I will blow a hole
in the airwaves, duck lasers in my dugout.
I’m done kidding them. Today I fly
the hell out in my Chrono-Jet.
To the future, where I’m forgotten.
Where surely no one gives a fuck
who I kiss: man, woman, or goldfish.
In the blustering garden where I was fed
compliments like you are our golden
apple and you are our yellow star, I lost
my lust for luster. They’d smile, fuck
me over for someone else: ringle
tted women
with sloping eyelids played the Chinese
cynosure, every time. Ursa Minor, you never
warned me: all my life I’ve been minor,
played the strumpet, the starved one.
I was taproot and crook. How I’ve hunched
down low, wicked girl, until this good earth
swallowed me raw. Take me now, dear comet,
to the future, where surely I’ll play
some girl from L.A., the unlikely heroine
who breaks up the brawl, saving everyone.
Anna May Wong Goes Home with Bruce Lee
We meet while he’s filming The Orphan.
My young skin gleams. I’m in the future,
1960. My real self is alive somewhere,
but I’ve jinxed my own time machine to find
him. The bar sweats, sweet with salt, conk,
lacquer. The jukebox plays “Chain Gang.”
We were born in the same golden state, surrounded
by cameras, chimeras for our other selves. He admits
some applause can be cruel, then steals a kiss.
Only he knows this terror—of casting so huge
a shadow over a million invisible faces. The silver
of our eyes dims them, and for that I don’t forgive
myself. But Bruce understands. He knows the same
shame. On the dance floor, he cups the small
of my back, his hands cold like gauntlets.
I like how he describes a machete. How he hooks
his digits with my incisors, how he rips the skin
off bad memories, with just one lip, bloody apple,
and one battle has me pinned, saddled, on my spine.
In the aftermath, he reads me his poems—“Though
the Night Was Made for Loving” and “Walking along
the Bank of Lake Washington”—and kisses me
with both eyes open, staring straight into me.
At this time, my heart dead, little pigeon buried
beside the torn twig. He asks me to take him
with me, to the future. It’s the only place we can live
together, he ventures. I want to say yes. I want to let
the flush flood us and take him there, our own
happy ending. But instead I say, It’s not ours to keep.
Instead, I kiss him. I bury his silence with my mouth.
Anna May Wong Has Breakfast at Tiffany’s
In Santa Monica, the sunrise has this way of emptying
everything inside you. I visit my future deathbed.
It’s February 1961, and I watch myself sleep.
Dawn: outside my window, date palms sway and lovers
in blue Corvettes make their morning getaways.
There will never be another breakfast. I die of a heart
attack. Perhaps the night never pauses its seesaws.
Perhaps I resign myself: Holly Golightly, I can’t go
lightly. I must face my fates—deception, despair, death.
Because being seen has a different meaning to someone
with my face. There will never be another breakfast.
The French toast sits untouched with the blackberries.
So I speed up time, reckless, toward a world
where I don’t exist. Eight months later, Audrey Hepburn
walks down Fifth Avenue in a black Givenchy.
This is the role I’d have died for. This is love,
reciprocated. Beside her, Mickey Rooney plays Yunioshi,
another tapeworm-eyed uncle with a limp. And I yawn
at another generation of white men in yellowface.
Before him: Roland Winters, Sidney Toler, Warner Oland.
There is applause for them. The laughter is constant.
I have played their daughters—their pretty but untrustworthy
incarnates. There is no second generation for actors like me
but I’ve often pined for them. My progeny. Girls with tar-black
widow’s peaks, who stumble across spotlights in purple tights,
taught to be meek. Girls who inherit my warnings, victories,
and failures, too. But for these girls, there will never be
breakfast. I will travel through all time searching for them.
Anna May Wong Blows Out Sixteen Candles
When I was sixteen, I modeled fur coats for a furrier.
White men gazed down my neck like wolves
but my mink collar protected me. When I was sixteen,
I was an extra in A Tale of Two Worlds. If I didn’t pour
someone’s tea, then I was someone’s wife. Every brother,
father, or husband of mine was nefarious. They held me
at knifepoint, my neck in a chokehold. If they didn’t murder
me, I died of an opium overdose. Now it’s 1984
and another white girl awaits her sweet sixteen. It’s 1984
and another white girl angsts about a jock who kisses
her at the end of the film. Now it’s 1984 and Long
Duk Dong is the white girl’s houseguest. He dances,
drunk, agog with gong sounds. All around the nation,
teens still taunt us. Hallways bloat with sweaters, slurs.
When I was eight, the boy who sat behind me brought pins
to class. “Do Asians feel pain the way we do?” he’d ask.
He’d stick the needles to the back of my neck until I winced.
I wore six wool coats so I wouldn’t feel the sting. It’s 1984
so cast me in a new role already. Cast me as a pothead,
an heiress, a gymnast, a queen. Cast me as a castaway in a city
without shores. Cast me as that girl who rivets center stage
or cast me away, into the blue where my lips don’t touch
or say. If I take my time machine back to sixteen, or twenty,
or eight, I’d blow out all my candles. Sixteen wishes
extinguish and burn. The boy will never kiss me at the end
of the movie. The boy will only touch me with his needles.
Antipode Essay
I. Empire of Opposites
Popular myth: if you dig a hole in the Montana badlands
through the earth’s private parts, your drill would end
up in China. Maybe then you’d tear open the floor.
I was born floating on a tendril of seaweed
and down the blue throat of that hospital corridor,
you’d ride your drill into a wall.
In that debris, consider: anti-ode, antipode,
the geography of fallacies on which we build our empires.
II. Terra Nullius
America cannot orient
itself without an opposite.
What a shame its real antipode
is inhospitable ocean—all suds, spillage,
spume—archipelago, Kerguelen:
Desolation Islands, morphology
of volcanic flank, where I dream we crash-
land, lantanas shaking away
our grids and girdles. In this diurnal
romance, we feed the feral reindeer
all the food we have. Island scientists
launch rockets: Centaure, Eridan,
Super Arcas. Names for deserted
myths. All winter we watch the sky grow
dim. Even Polaris cowers
against the victrix of dawn.
III. Terra Pericolosa
When two poles oppose,
west is the center and the rest
a suspect terrain.
Danger signs point at us. Unhook
this vampire meridian—
hinterland of my blood,
what’s the antidote
for these boiling winters?
For the heart’s heavy skulking?
I don’t blame
the ocean for
gorging on flotsam,
or eating peo
ple
alive.
IV. Empire of Opposites
In Bogota, on my knees
with altitude sickness. Through the hostel window,
constant lightning. All the ceiling beams gilded to Jakarta.
Eyelids soldered
to spoons, swooning temperature
of the days.
I’ll take back my hemisphere,
my haute other-hide. The longer I hide,
the brighter.
V. Terra Incognita
How democratic the stars were that night
the time we dug a hole
to America. Little pennants
announcing our penance
for a youth misspent.
Remember? It was December.
Our train galloped by Beijing
like a mare or its skeleton.
Through the window I saw
the city’s dust lift the plenum
of black hair. Where did our mettle
go, someone asked, and I didn’t know.
Metallurgy: in the antipode
of silence, we built platinum nests.
But here the earth
was wet with heliotrope
and the sorries
buried underneath
couldn’t sprout.
If it rains enough, shame
may turn into seeds.
Close Encounters of the Liminal Kind
Maglev train, Beijing to Wuhan—
snacks in the holster, I ride
the test track. We are crash test dummies
for levitation. Carry us, magnetic
fields—marvel, our travel
at these speeds without wheels,
in the silver caul where we feel safe.
I was born in Wuhan—left
at five, returning now. Here’s my ticket,
stamped, ready, an apology
for my foreign pelt. Childhood,
we used to sit three to one seat
as lightning poisoned the whole
night white, and only sows
populated the passing cityscapes.
On the road, a man, two women
and two children on their laps
cramp onto a single motorbike. Soil flies
beneath their heels. I watch them
from my porthole, missing
wheels, missing motion, how it slices
softly, softly, to salvage friction
Oculus Page 2