Book Read Free

Oculus

Page 5

by Sally Wen Mao


  Two: girl. Orphanage. Accident. Cryogenic sleep.

  Black dog serenades rouse her from tides.

  She doesn’t recognize the child on the beta

  tapes—purple hair, white ribbons tying

  her features together. Jupiter jazz crows,

  her childhood, sleep until the earth disappears.

  Three: woman. Always running. Always running

  out of fuel. Always straddling a slow horse,

  Red Tail, stranded in space with an unloaded

  pistol. This is what night imagined when it imagined

  a feral woman, jaw open and swiping. Windward.

  Loose claw. Less sigh than scowl. The last civet

  in the universe gnashes her teeth against the glass.

  Four: questioning. Is there mercy for a mercenary

  out there in the writhing galaxy,

  where jetties disappear into harbors

  drained of antimatter? Bounty hunters

  lurk in the undertow. Evening larks afoot.

  Five: conquest. Here’s her blackjack. Her torn

  jacket, her din, her turn. Her ammunition,

  her departure. Unrecognizable cities rise

  from empty shuttles, husks for drones.

  See you space cowboy, screams the Callisto

  Moon. On nights when the wind strips

  the highway bare, only the stars hunt her down.

  Lavender Town

  Don’t let the sour flowers fool you, child.

  This town is a dead town. The tower tolls

  to your trill, your heartbeat,

  inaudible

  to everyone except you. You listen. You hear.

  Ghost notes, discordant leaves

  clutter the earth, tin and rustle—

  a lachrymose bird cries,

  a graveyard glistens. When you climb the stairway,

  don’t shield your eyes

  from the pixels, 30 hertz heat—

  don’t shield your awe

  from the ghosts of pretty prey.

  The ones you catch

  when you’re alone and afraid.

  Lavender Town, noble purple town, plumed, perfumed

  dream of violet fields—can you hear

  the killing machine sing? What secrets hide?

  Why run? Why hold on?

  You walk by the side of the road, biting an apple

  as you wave your thumb—

  blood sickles down, a rebel

  you are, a hitchhiker, a tiny savant.

  When you grow up, and the screen lights up

  all your blind

  spots, and you replace the dead

  green cartridge

  with a blank one of your making,

  you’ll arrive, at last, at the final

  battle. Maybe then you’ll find

  that the game you’re playing

  is a hack—you thought you were invincible,

  and just like that, the boss

  KOs you. And other times, you’re astonished

  at your own breath.

  Other times, you thought you were dead,

  but your body was eternal all along.

  The Death of Ruan Lingyu

  Shanghai, 1935

  In your role for New Women, you played Wei Ming,

  a single mother, novelist, who dies as she declares

  she wants to live. In your dream, Wei Ming lived,

  kneeling at her daughter’s grave. You reach through

  the celluloid to try and touch her, but the screen turns

  dark, then bright with waves. Interrogate the Suzhou River:

  why drown the shore? Why? Entire shorelines of new women

  surge, ebb, turn to foam. You see their limbs in the water,

  thrashing, with nowhere to go. You can’t save

  them, touch them, make their feral grief any more

  endurable. Instead, they vanish. Instead, they recede.

  Laundry baskets scatter, upturned, laundry piles

  on the rooftops, laundry in the snow. You subsist on spit,

  spite, spotlight. You subsist on fright, moving

  across your face like a freight train over frozen tracks.

  Who carries you across the four-poster bed, the medicine

  cabinet, the pot of porridge? All you wanted was the lie

  where the beautiful disobedient ones survive.

  Soon their absence becomes your own. Your cigarette

  lights the frigid air, burning a hole in the landscape.

  After Nam June Paik

  Good Morning Mr. Orwell (1984)

  We wake up to the era of a doom tube. Save

  us, save us, save us—if our suffering

  is broadcasted, let it be known.

  Let it be collective. Let it be real, let it be

  the future real soon.

  Opera of our nightmares, today is the day

  the heavens have promised: the day we survive

  ourselves, move forward and fast. Farther and farther

  the sky rumbles over us—faster and faster,

  the transmissions, boomtowns, bodies in space:

  New York to Paris, Berlin to Seoul, WNET

  to Centre Pompidou, we broadcast

  our triplicate shadows, our robot politics,

  we install our souls, our space yodels, our rebel kisses,

  into your television set, your cell phones,

  until the moon rises

  in your kingdom

  and drowns in the cove of our satellite waves.

  Opera Sextronique

  “In my videotaped electro-vision, not only do you see your picture instantaneously and find out what kind of bad habits you have, but see yourself deformed in twelve ways.”

  —Nam June Paik

  12 ways I see myself deformed—

  shower: behind the fog, water, chemicals, dye, I die like suds, slip down the drain. I die like my own cells

  to clean my whole self. if this really meant rebirth.

  if this really meant change. or growth or vanishing.

  2 movements: sprinting to fulton street, the A or G, nostrand, bedford hair all static electricity skull all circuitboard—

  the windows on the trains like touchscreens

  through which we breathe our anonymous breath.

  subsistence on absence, or subsistence on substitutes. substitute part of a substitute whole.

  we are all your substitute holes.

  staring at myself in a mirror inside another mirror, entering these mirrors, accidentally scraping myself with these mirrors, touching myself

  through these mirrors, a labyrinth of mirrors, a language of mirrors,

  a labyrinth of chaos, yellow finches, finding no exit,

  and there is no exit from the labyrinth of mirrors.

  canceled TV show: errant body cloaked in wires. TV bra, TV cello, static, concerto, radio silence, rainbow

  of a lost transmission.

  your body is my search engine.

  I want to question it.

  on the LCD screen, I offer light but no breath. I author breadth but no depth.

  catch me drawing a portrait of these deformities

  on my tablet with my guilty fingerprints.

  catch me drawing you.

  to say I miss you: I can’t. my phone has buried my mouth.

  I am afraid of instant messages. most times it’s unbearable.

  I prefer the slow, gradual ones.

  sex is the pulse of a burning screen wrapped around your body. sex is the living sculpture. with this video monitor appendage, you are a minotaur, buff

  and brief. the video bra cages your breasts. the video penis makes you a machine.

  monitor lizards crawl over the powerpoints.

  then the bit about repulsion: about the monstrous static of sexual scripts. I don’t remember submitting to that. I sit with a man at a café table in central park.

  he doesn’t see my story. he threshes i
t, bends it, sucks it in like a vampire.

  pretty girls and money, the trouble with loneliness.

  always the ugly suits, fingernail clippings. thirsty mouths.

  I don’t remember tasting this tongue like a dead fish inside my mouth,

  closing my eyes, scalding.

  utopian laser TV station: I record myself reborn. I record myself unborn. I record myself a stillbirth.

  (absence) plant your nightmares in the soil / plant your wounds in the dirt

  (rebirth) they sprout into birds of paradise / they sprout into trees

  love is the refraction, pellucid as bone. if I can locate the gleam on the other side of the planet. the one who sees me whole. the one who honors my narrative,

  does not bend it, thresh it, obstruct or smash it. this I yearn. if I could plug my

  senses into that socket. let there be light.

  Li Tai Po

  After Li Po and Janelle Monáe

  You, robot-poet, hold four texts: pretext, subtext,

  context, metatext.

  O hexarchy of dead kings, the Monarch seat is empty.

  I can’t see much through this stereoscope: only frozen

  earth. A tundra, a wasteland, an orchard of scorched trees.

  I wait for your poems, like baroque lasers.

  I bring you offerings: yuzu, pear, mission fig.

  Dear robot, dear poet: I long to meet you in a new world

  where we can live our midsummer’s cyberpunk dream.

  Can we write this text together, rewrite history, rewrite his story,

  sneak past the auditorium of ruins—

  your body of ten antique TV cabinets: antique radio cabinet / Korean printing block

  Korean palimpsest / eleven color televisions

  Let’s recite a cento: Before my bed, the moon is shining bright,

  We suffered a rare, rare blue

  I think that it is frost upon the ground.

  So much hurt / I raise my head and look at the bright moon

  On this earth / I lower my head and think of home.

  Or two: Into a valley of a thousand bright flowers,

  all the birds and the bees, dancing with the freaks in the trees,

  watch the water turn to wine

  with the willow-flakes, falling like snow, and the vermilion

  girls getting drunk about sunset

  outer space and out your mind

  and the waters, a hundred feet deep reflecting green eyebrows

  Will you be electric sheep, electric ladies, will you sleep?

  There is no end of things in the heart.

  My robot, my poet, ancient and erstwhile and now

  and f—ever,

  the best mischief: to be stranded in this electricity with you.

  Mall of the Electronic Superhighway

  travelers in the night, united states of wanderers—

  welcome to the fluxus department store, your end of the world stop for your road trip

  you can wander these future stalls, where our hungry souls touch each other

  you can buy makeup made of mica, android pixels, space vectors, HD display:

  transform your face into a glowing orb

  transform your face into a projection of the night

  mall of the universe, mall of the multiverse, mall of wave-function collapse—

  you can meet and greet with the holographic dead.

  read james baldwin at the mall, he comes to life and whispers:

  “the old survivals of my generation will be wiped out.

  western civilization is heading for an apocalypse.”

  if this doesn’t comfort you, whitney, michael, and prince

  will sing in your ear. you will weep together. you will not be alone.

  it really is a miracle—that the electronic mall can curate an apocalypse

  into a beautiful, fashionable memory the texture of the silk

  you can’t afford.

  in 2005, a year before nam june paik died, the biggest mall in the world

  was built in dongba, china, and now it is an empty megalopolis,

  all the storefronts foreclosed, ghosts of dead enterprises

  rippling the manmade dam. no one operates the machinery.

  once I fell in love in an empty mall.

  twice I fell in love in an empty parking lot.

  the surveillance camera records our prettiest nightmares. silkscreen >

  touchscreen > monitor screen > tv screen. dreams whose warm

  light baptizes you. disbelief, disappear.

  go ahead: believe in miracles. believe in beauty and the universe and the future.

  our gear will transport you when you’re sleeping. somnambulating shoes

  so your body doesn’t have to.

  sprint a thousand miles in your future kicks, alison brand atom shoes.

  ditch your car in a ditch, with its sad steering wheel, its sad locomotion.

  you can travel from harlem to wall street in fifteen minutes with these tiny

  atomic engines. you can be naked in the city, and no one

  will see you through how fast you’re flying.

  The Death of Robot K-456

  The robot opera sends us to space.

  We look down. We don’t miss our lovers.

  Instead, we’re nostalgic for gravity.

  Permutations of ground: cement,

  grass, parquet, soil. Premonitions

  of sound: crash, pow, shriek.

  Down on earth, we saw the tragedy—

  the machine cracked under slow wheels.

  His cords and his bowels, twitching.

  The machine defecated on itself,

  spilling all its beans. We looked away.

  In another time, we would mourn.

  But for now, we hover, above patrols,

  above surveillance, above the borders,

  like migrants to a black hole, a Xanadu

  where no one dreams of finding us.

  Even if we cut off a limb or leap over

  an edge, no eyes watch us. We are free.

  Oculus

  After Solange, “An Ode To”

  May. Pale peonies on the sills.

  From the steps of the New York Public Library,

  we hailed a taxi uptown, past the lions—

  past Patience,

  past Fortitude,

  to the Guggenheim, where we sat, lotus

  style, wearing head-to-toe white

  with a sea of others.

  They checked our phones and cameras at the door.

  All of us, a cloud condensing

  into ourselves. Our forms.

  All city, all air, all sugar, all brown,

  all gold—have a seat,

  this is a cause for celebration.

  In many places in the world, it could have been

  a funeral. She appeared and she sang,

  descending down the spirals,

  the golden nautilus—past

  the skeletal Giacomettis, past the Duchamps,

  past the Modiglianis, under the centripetal glass—

  a single layer in the interior. None of our names

  were there. But our bodies. There they were.

  The most photographed place on earth

  was where we sat

  without cameras

  except our eyes and our faces.

  It was spring. I was still hopeful. In my chest, what beat

  was cracked but still salvageable. Cherry petals

  strewing my shoulders, a whir. Cranes

  in the sky, cranes threaded on my dress.

  Golden tubas warbled

  as she danced. We looked up, and there was

  a skylight, a dome—the oculus

  at the center, through which all fears still burned

  and awed.

  Resurrection

  In the autumn I moved to New York,

  I recognized her face all over the subway

  stations�
��pearls around her throat, she poses

  for her immigration papers. In 1924, the only

  Americans required to carry identity cards

  were ethnically Chinese—the first photo IDs,

  red targets on the head of every man, woman,

  child, infant, movie star. Like pallbearers,

  they lined up to get their pictures taken: full-face

  view, direct camera gaze, no smiles, ears showing,

  in silver gelatin. A rogue’s gallery of Chinese

  exclusion. The subway poster doesn’t name

  her—though it does mention her ethnicity,

  and the name of the New-York Historical

  Society exhibition: Exclusion/Inclusion.

  Soon, when I felt alone in this city, her face

  would peer at me from behind seats, turnstiles,

  heads, and headphones, and I swear she wore

  a smile only I could see. Sometimes my face

  aligned with hers, and we would rush past

  the bewildered lives before us—hers, gone

  the year my mother was born, and mine,

  a belt of ghosts trailing after my scent.

  In the same aboveground train, in the same

  city where slain umbrellas travel across

  the Hudson River, we live and live.

  I’ve left my landline so ghosts can’t dial me

  at midnight with the hunger of hunters

  anymore. I’m so hungry I gnaw at light.

  It tunnels from the shadows, an exhausting

  hope. I know this hunger tormented her too.

  It haunted her through her years in L.A., Paris,

  and New York, the parties she went to, people

  she met—Paul Robeson, Zora Neale Hurston,

  Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein. It haunts

  her expression still, on the 6 train, Grand

  Central station, an echo chamber behind

  her eyes. But dear universe: if I can recognize

  her face under this tunnel of endless shadows

  against the luminance of all that is extinct

  and oncoming, then I am not a stranger here.

  Notes

  “Oculus” in the first section is based on the story of a nineteen-year-old girl in Shanghai who uploaded her suicide onto Instagram in 2014.

 

‹ Prev