Oculus

by Sally Wen Mao

  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