Oculus
Page 3
against tracks, makes me think
of the homes I’ve lost to wilderness.
Someone says: the invention
of speed will ruin us all.
Rails glisten like scriptures awaiting
translation. Someone stops reading
his book and hurries toward
the exit. Someone gives up
his seat, drags his luggage
across the platform. Someone
climbs quietly onto the tracks.
Sometimes I take weeks to remember
a single word in my own tongue:
orange or courage or please.
Sometimes I take hours to work
up the courage to ask a question.
This barreling quiet, our euphemism
for speed. Gone, ferromagnetic
dreams—gone, fear of disquiet.
Once I met a boy on the overnight train.
I asked: have you ever wondered
who walks across these fields
at night? Who has the nerve
to breathe that ghostly air? We snuck
a kiss under his coat. Smoke
from other peoples’ cigarettes
entered our bodies. Behind our faces,
Wuhan scattered into fields
darkening with frost. This is a city
full of sensors. They detect
the shapes of hips and mouths.
There is heat at the center of it.
Electronic Motherland
Foxconn Riots, Taiyuan, September 2012
Some nights I wish to see my mother this way: live, handheld,
a breathing coma in my hands. Digit by digit my hand
comes apart, tissue from phalange, aluminum from bone.
An icepick for frost, a scalpel for lathe—I carve the icon
into each metal press. Midnight in the dormitories: pigeons
drop shit on the suicide netting. Mysterious gods show me how
to replicate my hands, how to mold ammunition
from shapeless muscle, how to play midwife to machines.
Each little wire insinuates our worth. Yesterday I obeyed,
but tonight we blow the bullhorn, trade our prowess
for din. The factory’s too quiet—it asks for siege. I love
a racket that kicks up dirt. It’s our wager to march away.
The Mongolian Cow Sour Yogurt Super Voice Girl
Super girls drink melamine.
Melamine in scandalous milk
infects us / titillates us
until the red mouth bursts open
into a sewage of cherry petals.
Super girls, submit
your audition tapes: give us
your milky songs
sung in unmolested hours,
all the sad karaoke bars
in every spring city.
Sing, like sprained
finches, drive us mad with yearning
and dull the thrum of the mic.
Raise your shy voices, girls;
gorge on little gospels.
We’ll toast to you, raise our glasses
to our lips, and quaff.
///
Super girls wear iris-enlarging contacts
so the black universes of their pupils
sap all light. Touch every chandelier crystal.
Every camera flash enters. Their eyes stolen
like torn irises. I’m in the live audience
where they feed us live girls for supper.
The stage rinses us with its pulse. They step
out, broken hearts and all, warbling
for forgiveness. “Are you not my beloved?”
they ask, and we say yes, believing them.
Heat soaks our clavicles. Today I wave a torn
pennant for my sisters who stammer,
who get voted off stage, on fours before four
million, who wipe dirt off the altar of a cartoon
cow, for my sisters who float on eternal gondolas
drinking melamine from boxes, summer
wilting across their flat chests, their vocal
chords drowned in potable water.
///
Super girls outperform their mothers.
Their mothers, of nondairy diets.
Their mothers, who snuck soy before dawn,
before the fields were razed, the time
when milk meant imperial muscles, thicker
hair, thighs, rounder infants. Their mothers
dreamt of dairy baths, curdling cheeses
out of reindeer milk, arms taut as Mongolian
nomads, wolf totems wishing for yogurt still.
So super girls were raised on dairy products
for their sinuous bodies. Super girls get epithetic
eye-fold surgeries. Give them your blessings,
mothers, even as the lighting smothers them.
Even if it pins them like flies to the territory
between camera and mouth. Where does flesh
end and fantasy begin? It’s in the umber
that carves the fold above the eye, how it flutters
like mayflies in its mesh of nerve endings.
///
The camera pans to your vulnerable self.
The self you want to hide is a sad pretty thing
with spindles under its eyes. It has webbed
fingers. Out of its throat, a croak. Lashes plucked
from waterline, a moat of tears you hide
in your flask. Is this half-dead girl good to sing?
What do you say, lonely girl? What are you afraid of?
The audience is listening. Think on your feet,
now: what do you sing for? Go ahead: recite the list.
My ghost brother and sister. The vale where I was born
ashamed. My mother who gave me the milk
she couldn’t drink. My bedridden story has yet to begin.
Electronic Necropolis
Guiyu Village, China
Behold how I tend to disappearance.
By slicing open dead circuitboards,
I cultivate rebirth. I douse
the hardware in pyretic acids
before it scrapes me, enters me, a lather of data
against my organs, bless them,
my warring insides. Even when the sun
half-drowns inside the black digital water,
its copper yoke doesn’t reflect.
It is these nights that I get apprehensive:
the hard drives I’d gutted incant like ghosts—
oracular fossils that dream up other lives
as my family ails quiet over bitter melon soup.
Past supper we play cards, gamble away our scraps,
our sleep still short-circuiting.
In the lagoon a fish swims by, its scales
shooting jets of bitumen.
Amazing, such captivity; I can’t help
marveling, as if I were on a plane going away
from Hong Kong, watching the city dismantle
beneath the fuselage—glowing, dying
circuit, ember half-faded into the skinless clouds.
What might—to shatter a microchip
with a pricked thumb. We unsolder our duress
with wire splinters, all lodged in our flesh
as if powering us. By noon, the megalomaniac
sun smiles down at the skinned machines.
It is the defects that incandesce, that supply
us with food, music, harm. The Lianjiang
River flows onward, north, toward the purple
rusk, the limestone cliffs. Under its water
skein, find the sum of foreign
dross. Riven, rising: a bloodless organ.
Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles
In Lijiang, the sign outside your hostel
glares: Ride alone, ride alone, ride
alone—it taunts you for the mileage
of
your solitude, must be past
thousands, for you rode this plane
alone, this train alone, you’ll ride
this bus alone well into the summer night,
well into the next hamlet, town,
city, the next century, as the trees twitch
and the clouds wane and the tides
quiver and the galaxies tilt and the sun
spins us another lonely cycle, you’ll
wonder if this compass will ever change.
The sun doesn’t need more heat,
so why should you? The trees don’t need
to be close, so why should you?
The sea is full of jetsam tonight. A thousand
miles away, you think of shores,
sitting at the KTV bar in Lijiang, listening.
A song comes up: Jay-Z with Rihanna,
umbrella-ella-ella-eh, strangers singing
into the strange night, and it’s like home to you,
this cocktail of ashes dusting your knees.
This city is famous for yak meat, rhododendron,
and one-night stands. You wait for yours
to show up. He works at the bar, looks like Takeshi
Kaneshiro. He clutches your waist as you ask
for more songs, more wine, more fruit.
Another: Teresa Teng, whose voice is the song
you have in common. “The Moon Represents
My Heart”—but tonight the moon represents
your sorrow in the Old Town Square.
Later as you lie in the cheap hotel in the electric
New City, Takeshi tells you he has never
left this province his whole life.
His family grows a peach orchard, and the fattest
peaches ripen in September. Where can I mail
you a peach? he asks. Tell him you’re flying
to Indonesia. He asks why you’re going
somewhere so far away. Say: in Manhattan,
there are thousands of gargoyles
that travel around the world
as everyone else sleeps.
Say: in Brooklyn, there is a chance
to rebuild a life from trash—
long-stemmed roses blooming
in the dumpsters, bodegas spilling purple
dragonfruit still good to eat.
Say: one morning outside Bryant Park,
you stood watching a garbage
fire destroy a basket of rotten mangoes.
Within five minutes, firefighters
came to extinguish it. You peered inside
afterward, and the nothing you saw
was wet and dark and smoldering.
Above you, a crane lifted a tiny man higher
and higher, until light stretched
his limbs into a sheaf of minerals.
He was dust before the wrecking
ball swung.
This land promises snowfall. This land promises windfall.
This land promises the return of brief days. May this land
promise you a body, some muscle, some organ, a brain.
Some ribs made of dark tinder, their insides lit, all vesicle,
atrium. May this kindling promise you a hearth and last
past your dread, October’s sleet, past scarred trees,
then winter, then mend and on and onward and orbit you so you are blank
as memory, turn into paper—crinkle, burn, and finally open.
The Diary of Afong Moy
No. 8 Park Place, Manhattan, November 1834
The merchant brothers who brought me here,
Freddy and Nate Carne, knew I’d make
it rain for them. In their eyes I was a hothouse
flower, a goddess of $$$$$$$$$$$$$$.
They decorated me with precious imports—
baubles, yellow pantalettes, damasks—
then placed me in a diorama of snuff boxes
and silk. I was a breathing mannequin
on my brocade throne. I couldn’t believe how
many people paid to see me. Banknotes
dropped, jawbones dropped, and it was truly
unnerving, to watch the white people
stare at me, mouths twitching in awe or pity,
or both. The men looked at my little
feet. The women, at my regalia. They wanted
to see my feet uncovered, can you believe
the nerve? The podiatrists, the reporters, begged
for a glimpse. At the men, I snickered.
At the women, I smiled. They swooned, blushed,
as if they swallowed Sichuan peppercorns.
Their corsets were killing them.
Heavens! A grotesquerie, their spines
all crooked in their skeletons. I raised my brows,
ensconced in my civilized box.
I counted the days with my abacus.
Look, I was fucking
bored. Was I the animal here? Or were they?
On my throne in lonely New York, I presaged
my own descent. It began with a tongue, English
creature, that curled its way into my mouth.
They called me the Celestial Princess. I wanted
them to bow down. So they did—they fell
at my feet in penance. Or worship. A vernissage
of my ancestors across my face. A slap.
The Oval Office, Washington, D.C., 1835
They took me to the capital.
Winter, gray as steel,
the White House, with its forlorn arches.
Give me a coronation,
a title: queen of a bastardized
empire. Let me quench America’s
thirst for royalty. I performed
a song in Cantonese for the President
of the United States
of America, Mr. Andrew S. Jackson.
Glory is a strange concept here—
No riches, no throne,
no robes, no royalty. He seemed
polite enough, but he was no
emperor. Atung warned me:
don’t get too confident.
Mr. President may look unremarkable,
but beneath his skin, lodged
near his heart, are bullets never removed
from when he murdered
a man. This nice man is a slave
trader, plantation owner,
founder of the Democratic Party,
and his nickname? Jackass.
Mr. President shook my hand, stared
at my feet like other men,
begged me to ask my countrymen
to change their laws.
I sang. I hollered. My whole
life in my throat. To the audience,
my voice sounded ghastly,
my words were inscrutable.
The lyrics, if I remember—
how a face conceals its intentions
like a woman conceals her name.
Charleston, South Carolina, 1835
Antebellum South blew a breeze through my skull
like something hot and rotting.
In Charleston, the public
began demanding me to strip.
Take off your shoes, they said. They wanted my naked
feet, and even I barely saw my own feet
uncovered. And then they took my shoes
off, one by one, the skin underneath
glowing translucent. They loved how I
flinched, my cheeks burning like copper.
By evening, the muskets sounded off, the riots
blasted, screams all night. Rebellion
painting the towns all ghostly. Something
in me stole away, ran for the hills covered
in mist, ran for the sea. In the end
my diorama was a diorama, not a house
with a roof. It wasn’t fireproof.
In my Southern sleeping chambers, I dreamt
of home—the fishing village, the locus
t
tree near the river where I used to sit
with friends. My father in the foyer,
counting coins, scraping rice in his bowl.
A silver spoon is an American import,
the only one he could trade for tea.
But I was his biggest Canton export, a living
specimen. A button-eyed doll. My eyes
could see the specters in their cities,
my nose could smell the murders
in their field, my ears could hear
the clamors in their forest, and at last
I lost it; I smashed the trinkets. Snuffed
the snuff boxes, tore the silk, raided
the chests, drank all the wine, ripped
the irises from their parched soil. Panic
plundered the property! Its wreckage
was my greatest show on earth—
The Barnum Years, 1844—?
The show must go on. And on and on,
replaced by another show, and that’s the trouble
with artifice. It never ends. Mr. Phineas T. Barnum
loved his freaks, a prophet for profits, from ersatz
mermaid to Giantess to Joice Heth, her frail immortality.
In the newspaper he questioned whether I’d ever
been a Lady. Brought another family of Celestials,
advertised their veracity to discredit me.
As if there couldn’t be two respectable Chinese ladies
in America at the same time. To promote
one, strip the dignity of the other. There was no word
for tokenism in those days of yore.
When you were rare, when you were a Lady,
you had to be tender, you had to be good.
Anna May Wong Meets Josephine Baker
Casino de Paris, seat in the back. It’s 1932 and I’m in exile
again. Paris makes the best kind of exile—the woman on stage
agrees, riding in on her mane of sequined feathers. Horses
like white phantoms galloping under her dress. What is it
about the stage lights that casts our bodies both desirable
and diabolical? She lifts her wings, and air rushes—lightning
strikes the audience, the white feathers fall. I catch her eye
at midnight and she invites me into her dressing room. Blood
orange peels scatter on the ground. Her cockatoos wail
in a cage, her pet cheetah spread-eagled on her alpaca furs.
We toast to Piccadilly, Paris, drink brandy, chat about home—