We are hard by Margaret Atwood

i

We are hard on each other
and call it honesty,
choosing our jagged truths
with care and aiming them across
the neutral table.

The things we say are
true; it is our crooked
aim, our choices
turn them criminal.

ii

Of course your lies
are more amusing:
you make them new each time.

Your truths, painful and boring
repeat themselves over & over
perhaps because you own
so few of them

iii

A truth should exist,
it should not be used
like this. If I love you

is that a fact or a weapon?

iv

Does the body lie
moving like this, are these
touches, hairs, wet
soft marble my tongue runs over
lies you are telling me?

Your body is not a word,
it does not lie or
speak truth either.

It is only
here or not here.

Up by Margaret Atwood

You wake up filled with dread.
There seems no reason for it.
Morning light sifts through the window,
there is birdsong,
you can’t get out of bed.

It’s something about the crumpled sheets
hanging over the edge like jungle
foliage, the terry slippers gaping
their dark pink mouths for your feet,
the unseen breakfast— some of it
in the refrigerator you do not dare
to open— you will not dare to eat.

What prevents you? The future. The future tense,
immense as outer space.
You could get lost there.
No. Nothing so simple. The past, its density
and drowned events pressing you down,
like sea water, like gelatin
filling your lungs instead of air.

Forget all that and let’s get up.
Try moving your arm.
Try moving your head.
Pretend the house in on fire
and you must run or burn.
No, that one’s useless.
It’s never worked before.

Where is it coming from, this echo,
this huge No that surrounds you,
silent as the folds of the yellow
curtains, mute as the cheerful

Mexican bowl with its cargo
of mummified flowers?
(You chose the colours of the sun,
not the dried neutrals of shadow.
God knows you’ve tried.)

Now here’s a good one:
you’re lying on your deathbed.
You have one hour to live.
Who is it, exactly, you have needed
all these years to forgive?

Disgusting, isn’t it, how much we want to be loved? by Jane Wong

Recently, on a flight from Chicago to Seattle, I watched a young girl in the next row vomit into her father’s hands. Chunks of partially digested food—pink and beige—stuck to her mouth and chin. The father sat there, hands cupped almost as if in prayer, holding his daughter’s perpetually spilling vomit. The smell shot through the recycled air and everyone pinched their noses. Her father kept murmuring it’s OK, it’s OK, holding this stuff that was once inside her. I stared. I did not offer to help, but I didn’t look away either. I felt awful. I wish I had a father who would hold my vomit like it was still a part of me to be loved. 

How did vomit lead me to my estranged father? At forty-one, I feel disgusted by my desire to be daughtered by a father who wants nothing to do with me. Disgust swims somewhere in the gurgling pit of shame and desire. 

____

I think of this startlingly beautiful description of vomit in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye: “The puke swaddles down the pillow onto the sheet—green-gray, with flecks of orange. It moves like the insides of an uncooked egg. Stubbornly clinging to its own mass, refusing to break up and be removed. How, I wonder, can it be so neat and nasty at the same time?”

____

I grew up in a strip mall on the Jersey shore, in a takeout restaurant next to a pizzeria, a liquor store, and a beauty salon. Most kids at school got dropped off in their neighborhood; I got dropped off in the Shrewsbury Plaza parking lot, full of squawking seagulls and loose gravel. Someone once scrawled meat is murder on the side of our building, red paint dripping onto thistle weeds. I scrubbed that off, dirt and sweat and paint pooling down my seagull legs. I grew up knowing I was dirty, an abject body before I was even born. My parents immigrated from southern China in the early eighties, fleeing a history of hunger after the Great Leap Forward, when an egg was a rare planet of protein. I grew up eating rotten meat because we simply couldn’t afford to waste it. I worried my house had a smell, that poor Chinese smell—musty towels, old cooking oil, fermenting herbs. I grew up smelling my menstrual blood and watched it gloss my legs, metallic and feral. My debased smell lingers in my armpits, my pussy, my mouth and its cavities, my not knowing which fork to use at a gala I’m invited to as a poet. Who deemed me disgusting? Who deemed me debased?

____

Disgust is not just a feeling. It’s a reflex that lives in the gut. It can make you throw up. In Disgust: The Gatekeeper Emotion, the psychologist Susan B. Miller writes about disgust as a kind of border control—it draws a line, a boundary, around what we deem repulsive. Miller notes that disgust is deeply tied to smell, taste, and touch. It can also be wielded over you, making strangers decide you are too disgusting to exist. With the history of Yellow Peril and Asian abjection in mind, the scholar Monica Chiu’s Filthy Fictions engages ideas of filth through Asian American feminist literature. She positions dirt as “a national fiction about Others that conflates connotations of worthlessness and rubbish” alongside “the moral defilement in the term ‘filth.’” I like to think I’m among a lineage of Asian American feminist writers upholding disgust as a means of active resistance and radical repulsion. 

Kim Hyesoon is one of my most beloved disgusting writers. In an interview with Guernica, the South Korean poet says she “came to grotesque language in the patriarchal culture under the dictatorship.” Under the conditions of the patriarchy’s demand for cleanliness and beauty arises the need to be as disgusting as possible. In “Nest: Day Fourteen,” from Autobiography of Death, she writes: “Eyebrows: Two maggots trace strands of rain as they move.” These are not neat, even, plucked eyebrows. These are maggots moving in wet rain. Their thick, pus-like bodies writhe on your face. I revel in this tender horror, this romantic disturbance. 

____

I have been estranged from my father for so long that I’ve stopped counting the years. Twenty-five? Twenty-six? I’m now around the age my father was when he left our family. When I was little, about nine, I picked up a glass of what I thought was apple juice. When my father saw me drinking his whiskey, he couldn’t stop laughing. I kept drinking that glass of whiskey even though I was disgusted by its gasoline spit. It was worth making my father laugh. After finishing the glass, I laughed with him, our syrupy voices burning with liquor. Disgusting, isn’t it, how much we want to be loved?

____

In my dream of reconciliation, my dream of the impossible, I want my father to cradle my vomit. I want him to see the speckled galaxies within it, to love it so much he would slurp it back up, ingesting all the years we’ve missed. I am reminded of Chen Chen’s poem “Winter,” which begins: “Big smelly bowel movements this blue January morning.” Those “b” sounds in big, bowel, blue, a bilabial stop consonant. How we have to bring the lips together to produce this B  vibration, like those roiling bowel movements. This love poem—and it is a love poem—plays with what we should and shouldn’t write about: “years ago, a teacher said never to use the word ‘poop’ in a poem.” What does it mean to love someone even when they disgust you? What does it mean to say: I will let that touch me, I will let that contaminate me? To not just write about it as a means of resistance, but to relish the visceral sensation of it all? 

I think about what disgusts me and how to love its coagulating parts. And how hard it is to separate interior and exterior disgust; does your disgust of me make me despicable to myself? I am disgusted by my desperate desire to be loved, even in abusive relationships. How I’ve slinked back to vile things, vodka breath and unwashed sheets. I am disgusted by month-old moldy leftovers in my fridge, my fear of opening the containers and smelling the ripe hideousness of my wastefulness and inability to throw away such waste. How this comes from my family’s struggle with hoarding—the fruit flies’ sloshing murmuration in my grandmother’s apartment full of collapsed apples and oranges. Her fear of scarcity is my mother’s fear of scarcity is my fear of scarcity. 

Yet, something glows in my grandmother’s crates of bad eggs and their urine smell. Something delicious, something pungently unashamed, something transformed into orbs of promised usefulness. The thing is: something always grows in filth. Kim’s maggots will burst into winged things. My menstrual blood can fertilize plants. I come from where I come from, at once a place of leaking trauma and radical love. How dare I be disgusted by what runs through my guts. It is a fertile terror, a teeming custard of poetic possibility. I want to flaunt and flourish in the gagging. To refuse clean language, to swim in the steaming specks of vomit and poop and rot that can offer something transformative and uncontainable.

Moon Wound by Yi Sang

The mustached man takes out a watch. I also take out my watch. He says, I am late.

I say, I am late.

The moon rises one day and a night late, dressed like a bleeding heart. Totally

broken - the Moon may be hemophiliac.

The Earth reeks, choking my nose with sorrow. I walk in the opposite direction of

the Moon. I worry - how can the Moon be so miserable -

I think of what happened yesterday - the darkness - and what will happen tomor-

row - the darkness -

The Moon lags behind, refusing to march. My barely visible shadow wobbles up and

down. The Moon can hardly bear its own weight., foreshadowing the menacing

gloom of tomorrow. Now I must find some other word.

I must fight against the words of the Heavens, which are like the coldest winter. I

must stay frozen between the iceberg and the snowy mountain. I must forgive ev-

erything about the Moon - to discover a new moon.

Soon I shall hear a deafening noise. The Moon will fall. The Earth will bleed pro-

fusely.

People will tremble. They will swim in the Moon's evil blood and freeze.

Is this strange ghostliness infiltrating my bone marrow? Perhaps only I will be able

to sense the final tragedy on the Earth, which even the Sun has abandoned.

I finally chase down my galloping shadow and get in front of it. Now, my shadow

chases me as if it is my tail.

The Moon is in front of me. New - new - like a flame - or perhaps like a rapturous

flood -

Mirror by Yi Sang

Inside the mirror is soundless

Perhaps no other world is so silent

*

Inside the mirror I still have ears

Two pitiful ears cannot understand my words

*

Inside the mirror I am a lefty who knows not

how to take handshake — a lefty who knows no handshakes

*

Because of the mirror I cannot meet the me-inside-the-mirror 

Because of the mirror I get to meet the me-inside-the-mirror

*

I do not have the mirror now but the me-inside-the-mirror is in it 

I would not know but he is probably obsessed with his lefty work

*

The me-inside-the-mirror is the opposite of me and yet 

looks quite like me -I am disappointed

I cannot agonize over and examine the me-inside-the-mirror

Yi Sang, October 1933

거울

거울속에는소리가없소 저렇게까지조용한세상은참없을것이오

거울속에도내게귀가있소 내말을못알아듣는딱한귀가두개나있소

거울속의나는왼손잡이오 내악수(握手)를받을줄모르는악수(握手)를모르는왼손잡이오

거울때문에나는거울속의나를만져보지를못하는구료마는 거울아니었던들내가어찌거울속의나를만나보기만이라도했겠소

나는지금(至今)거울을안가졌소마는거울속에는늘거울속의내가있소 잘은모르지만외로된사업(事業)에골몰할께요

거울속의나는참나와는반대(反對)요마는 또꽤닮았소 나는거울속의나를근심하고진찰(診察)할수없으니퍽섭섭하오

"I don't really wanna be stuck with all the mistakes I've made. 

It's hard to change when all you can think about is all the bad things you've done. 

I just wanna be free to start over. 

I just wanna start over. 

And I wanna be forgiven."

#euphoria

"I wanna wake up to someone who expects me to be the best version of myself."

#euphoria