ANTICIPATION by Ada Limon

Before I dug 
the plot 
in our yard 
before we had 
a yard, when 
grass only grew 
between stop 
signs and garbage 
cans, when I 
had one pot 
for a pepper 
And one pot 
for a roma
on the fire 
escape, I was 
planting my 
secret seeds 
inside you 
the crimson 
linen curtains 
billowing in 
liquid spring 
wind, the future
deepening 
in the heat. 

 

“I'm learning so many different ways to be quiet. There's how I stand in the lawn, that's one way. There's also how I stand in the field across from the street, that's another way because I'm farther from people and therefore more likely to be alone. There's how I don't answer the phone, and how I sometimes like to lie down on the floor in the kitchen and pretend I'm not home when people knock. There's daytime silent where I stare, and a nighttime silent when I do things. There's shower silent and bath silent and California silent and Kentucky silent and car silent and then there's the silence that comes back, a million times bigger than me, sneaks into my bones and wails and wails and wails until I can't be quiet anymore. That's how this machine works.”

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

Nothing But Death by Pablo Neruda

 

There are cemeteries that are lonely,
graves full of bones that do not make a sound,
the heart moving through a tunnel,
in it darkness, darkness, darkness,
like a shipwreck we die going into ourselves,
as though we were drowning inside our hearts,
as though we lived falling out of the skin into the soul.

And there are corpses,
feet made of cold and sticky clay,
death is inside the bones,
like a barking where there are no dogs,
coming out from bells somewhere, from graves somewhere,
growing in the damp air like tears of rain. 

Sometimes I see alone
coffins under sail, 
embarking with the pale dead, with women that have dead hair,
with bakers who are as white as angels,
and pensive young girls married to notary publics,
caskets sailing up the vertical river of the dead,
the river of dark purple,
moving upstream with sails filled out by the sound of death,
filled by the sound of death which is silence.

Death arrives among all that sound
like a shoe with no foot in it, like a suit with no man in it,
comes and knocks, using a ring with no stone in it, with no
finger in it,
comes and shouts with no mouth, with no tongue, with no
throat.
Nevertheless its steps can be heard
and its clothing makes a hushed sound, like a tree.

I'm not sure, I understand only a little, I can hardly see,
but it seems to me that its singing has the color of damp violets,
of violets that are at home in the earth,
because the face of death is green,
and the look death gives is green,
with the penetrating dampness of a violet leaf
and the somber color of embittered winter.

But death also goes through the world dressed as a broom,
lapping the floor, looking for dead bodies,
death is inside the broom,
the broom is the tongue of death looking for corpses,
it is the needle of death looking for thread.

Death is inside the folding cots:
it spends its life sleeping on the slow mattresses,
in the black blankets, and suddenly breathes out:
it blows out a mournful sound that swells the sheets,
and the beds go sailing toward a port
where death is waiting, dressed like an admiral.

A Wreath of Hummingbirds by Cathy Park Hong

I suffer a different kind of loneliness.

From the antique ringtones of singing

wrens, crying babies, and ballad medleys,

my ears have turned

to brass.

 

They resurrect a thousand extinct birds,

Emus, dodos, and shelducks, though some,

like the cerulean glaucous macaw,

could not survive the snow. How heavily

they roost on trees in raw twilight.

 

I will not admire those birds,

not when my dull head throbs, I am plagued

by sorrow, a green hummingbird eats me alive

with its stinging needle beak.

 

Then I meet you. Our courtship is fierce

in a prudish city that scorns our love,

as if the ancient laws of miscegenation

are still in place. I am afraid

I will infect you

 

after a virus clogs the gift economy:

booming etrade of flintlock guns sag.

Status updates flip from we are all

connected to we are exiles.

What bullshit

 

when in that same prudish city,

they have one exact word to describe the shades

of their sorrow, when they always sit together

and eat noodles during white days

of rain, in one long table,

though not all.

 

As a boy, my father used to trap

little brown sparrows, bury them in hot coal,

and slowly eat the charred birds alone

in the green fields, no sounds,

no brothers in sight.

 

Holiest are those who eat alone.

Do not hurt them, do not push them, insult them,

do not even stare at them, leave

them to eat alone, in peace.

 

 

Characteristics of Life by Camille T. Dungy

 A fifth of animals without backbones could be at risk of extinction, say scientists. 

         -BBC Nature News   

Ask me if I speak for the snail and I will tell you

I speak for the snail.
                          speak of underneathedness
and the welcome of mosses,
                                        of life that springs up,
little lives that pull back and wait for a moment.

I speak for the damselfly, water skeet, mollusk,
the caterpillar, the beetle, the spider, the ant.
                                                        I speak
from the time before spinelessness was frowned upon.

Ask me if I speak for the moon jelly. I will tell you
                        one thing today and another tomorrow
        and I will be as consistent as anything alive
on this earth.

                        I move as the currents move, with the breezes.
What part of your nature drives you? You, in your cubicle
ought to understand me. I filter and filter and filter all day.

Ask me if I speak for the nautilus and I will be silent
as the nautilus shell on a shelf. I can be beautiful
and useless if that's all you know to ask of me.

Ask me what I know of longing and I will speak of distances
        between meadows of night-blooming flowers.
                                                        I will speak
                        the impossible hope of the firefly.

                                                You with the candle
burning and only one chair at your table must understand
        such wordless desire.

                                To say it is mindless is missing the point.

After Opening The New York Times I Wonder How to Write a Poem about Love by Camille T. Dungy

To love like God can love, sometimes.

Before the kettle boils to a whistle, quiet. Quiet

that is lost on me, waiting as I am

for an alarm. The sort of things I notice:

the bay over redbud blossoms, mountains

over magnolia blooms. There is always something

starting somewhere, and I have lost ambition

to look into the details. Shame fits comfortably

as my best skirt, and what can I do

but walk around in that habit? Turn the page.

Turn another page. This was meant to be

about love. Now there is nothing left but this.

“Love...no such thing.

Whatever it is that binds families and married couples together, that's not love. That's stupidity or selfishness or fear. Love doesn't exist. 

Self interest exists, attachment based on personal gain exists, complacency exists. But not love. Love has to be reinvented, that’s certain.”

Rhapsody by Diane Seuss

I like to call marriage state-sponsored

fucking. To return

to the world I must learn

how to love the world again. My problem

is with the word again. I don’t like repeat

performances. I come from a long line

of hungry people who hate leftovers.

The only movie I can watch more than once

is the original Frankenstein. I like the present

tense of spectacle. It’s like eating

 

an over-sour pickle. Wakes you up but hurts

your gonads. I got good

at romance early by choosing to wear pink

knee socks to the funeral. I sat on the floor

of the hearse on the ride from the church

to the cemetery, “making the best of it.” That’s

romance. It’s like when my mother took me to see

Mary Poppins for my eighth birthday and it turned her

into a flaming bitch. I understand why you didn’t like it,

I said to her, but I really loved it because I’m a kid.

 

Actually I hated it as much as she did.

That’s romance. Or when she went to the slaughterhouse

to pick up a cow heart for my science project.

It was still warm, wrapped in white paper.

They handed it over like a newborn and she gagged

all the way home. That’s romance. Some poet wrote

that he adores economy and requires precision.

I actually looked for antonyms:

extravagance, ignorance, imprudence, negligence, squandering.

I felt like a poor kid who finds a quarter and gorges

 

themselves on penny candy. From then on, everything

I created or promoted would be Rococo. Bows

and beams of sunlight festooning the candelabra

of the bewigged swing set. I have oppositional

poetry disorder. I want to express

my opinion about people expressing their opinions.

If only I could jump on the back of a motorcycle

and ride into the sweet potato field where the mother

deer flash their hooves and roar, and lay flat on the snake-laced

ground at midnight and watch the empty spectacle of the numb

 

satellites’ mindless circling that looks a lot like a boob

who thinks they’ve found nirvana. And to observe

with a jaundiced eye the skunk family march in a line

out of the cedar swamp and eat crayfish from a washtub. I want a papa

bear to split the Tree of Life down the middle scattering

the wormy apples. His furry berry-stained maw

such a display of what used to be called reality. 

I want the next turn I make to be unearned.

Like getting gang-banged in a greenhouse at age fourteen

and calling it a honeymoon. I guess now that would be called

 

trauma, a word I’ve grown to hate. It’s like a cute puppy

who got old and whose only new trick is shitting in the house,

or a Band-Aid they call “flesh colored”

that only matches the flesh of the owner of the Band-Aid

company. A word can be overused into emptiness,

which is also a banality, so don’t tell anyone you love them.

If you call fucking making love I’ll kill you in your sleep.

Don’t say I do. It’s what suckers say, what liars say,

never take an oath wearing clothes that have to be hung

on padded hangers.

 

When women are murdered

people on TV always comment on the victim’s cheerfulness.

Like being a songful canary should have kept her

from getting her throat slit. My advice is to live on a street

in which no one will say, when you’re murdered,

things like that don’t happen here. Live in a neighborhood

where every house is considered a scar on the face

of France. My adult son calls me at noon to ask

if I ever loved his father. How can I

express that marital love is twelve banalities ago?

 

It’s like asking if I liked the taste of peaches

when I was a toddler. I preferred

smoke, catalpa worms, bowling trophies,

and using tweezers to remove the lit-up ass of a firefly

so I could smear it around my finger like a wedding ring.

The adage is that a cynic is a broken romantic

except for Arthur Rimbaud who was born and died

a misanthropic shrew. I would like to conjecture

that a romantic is a cynic who has been infected

with resurrection metaphors and believes in the integrity

 

of a good

line break. I know

someone who saw a famous

lounge singer carried out

of a Vegas hotel

on a stretcher with a broken

light bulb in his ass.

Be that guy.

Don’t be Jesus, be the Shroud.

Don’t be the savior, be the stain.