Month: January 2017

in the remembrance of,

it’s past midnight everyday
and the starlight car chasers
dwindle into mist
as the ground freezes up like
a cup of helium
we straddle ourselves awake, mind reeling
from the picture show
cast onto fractal shadows of a blank wall
forget eternal lights, pinprick
myths and lovers
throwing all their splendor to reflect
off spirit snow
we tread so slowly that
our feet do not impress
only a trace of touch and go
tripping on a stray garden hose
left out from so long ago

~

hours or millions of light years away
my grandmother creaks
i hear the joints of her hands
sighing down coarse netted sheets
stirs up moth and mosquito wings, fluttering
all saturated with sullen winter heat
her blinds gently shifting through shadows in the
fallow shades of late afternoon
a carcinogenic, full, a lusty smell
wafting through thick monoliths
standing bent up in the hallway, or
a nook like a snag in the vertebrae
soft bones and almond eyes
and a soft thumping of sorrow
drummed up against the marrowed warmth
of living blood
a vein of thought,
genetic melody
i want to call out in my own tongue
it comes murmuring like a
snaggletoothed child
then turns to liquid, and
evaporates like wisps rolling off the foams of
a fisherman’s sea
folded origami and red envelopes
leaflings on golden foils
tucked inside the wooded fingers of
a kumquat tree
creased within the lining of
our lineage
we roll under in our sleep

~

another darkness falls upon the Eastern sun
spinning silver silks into the tropics of Cancer
ông, not like a song but like a phone
too heavy for respite
Tiến, synonymous thiện
to think of such dictionary conundrums
and kindness
so much sombre, happy love
all rotted sinew and lychen spring

why does my heart swell like a typhoon
with a mind wandering eugenic possibilities?

~

light an incense to commemorate hand-wrung nylons
strung like lanterns in our french caged windows
smoky snake entrails coil up unfurling
secrets to the ancestral shrine
about the language we lost in the lines
held silent for fear of civil butchery
place a clementine and a cup of rice wine
beneath the fathered frame but
be sure to keep the flames
from touching ethanol
i know these portraits though
i don’t keep my own
and the dichromosomes leave
ghosts still simmering
enamored by the bowls
of jungle roots
which knot me up
into lotus trance
Tran-cendental
(or, centennial for good luck
and prosperity)
reborn as a tooth in a dragons mouth
coddled by the jasmine moon

~

to reach and touch
and know the faces
of those
i still remember
to trace the image that is my own
to turn these weathered bones in
loving recognition without
becoming stone