The fountains are quiet, gardens brown,

concubines choreograph the palace

and are directed by eunuchs.

The best go off on pilgrimage

while the arcades cough up

cobwebs instead of silks in every color.

How many levels of nostalgia are you on?

I know, counting seems to take the fun out of it,

Yet, there are limits and there are levels,

Again, how high and how wide

Is your painful longing for the past right now?

I’m so sorry your celestial minds

Were deemed unworthy of the spotlight we’ve dedicated to the man who would

Never been known if you were not the first bloom

And stories written by

Ivory powders

And male egotism,

Half-hearted “I love my wife when she obeys me” sagas--arrogance and bigotry

And a son. We know he loved his mother.

Mourned her in the myths where he caused her death.

Cherished her in the ones where she didn’t die.

Heard her when she called out Siddhartha, Siddhartha,

come sit next to me and listen to my voice. Siddhartha,

love is everything. You must love. You must love

your mother tells you to drench yourself in every piece of clothing you own and you do not want

to be a jungli so you wrap your torso in kurtas and salwar kameezes and layer your long legs in

tight churidars and you want to bring your ghagras but they are too heavy to run in so you leave

90 Days

to flee from

the gunshots,

the crimes,

the threats.

wǒmen—or to say—we

are waiting by the sea, & i watch

my mother confess to receding

shorelines. there is only plurality

in her stories, only wǒmen, only

because that’s all i wanted to be.

a girl left nameless—rendered whole

& baptized in all things holy.

please. this is a eulogy for girls

born untitled. we can be more than the syllables

clenched between yellowing teeth.

用普通话对诘1

洞穴里的君子2

灯泡咣当旋落

How do you come back normal

from Deliverance Day

Milo: …women so beautiful they don’t seem like they exist.

Father Rogers: It only seems that way because you’re young. (cigarette) Or actually—you’ll stop caring eventually. Time has a way of levelling it all out.

(speaking on Naya)

Milo: It’s the voice that goes before the laugh. I’m thinking of getting myself hypnotized because she’s still there completely if I have a dream or something. It’s not my fault, the impression, you know, the somatic thing…starts to fade. It’s a defense mechanism. It’s time…

Rogers: Leveling it all out, taking care of it all…

Milo: I don’t want that—like this. (beat)

茶壶上几抹青烟

的间隙

白雪皑皑

送走了两三故人

With fond sentiment

I recall with selective detail

One dimly lit

Night, outside some bottle store

When for the first time I

Felt something different because you

There have been plenty of times when I had to fight for my life.

Sometimes it was for my “health and safety”,

sometimes for happiness.

I fought for what I could not bear to lose,

but I lost all the same. I can still recall the taste of all

those defeats, as bitter as unripe plums.

His hands smell of anemone and mushrooms

on a spring morning.

The sea is flat as he is silent.

He’s a man who deals with silence and water, with

the weight of the stones in his pockets.