“American Lessons” & “Gravity”
→ PUBLISHED IN ISSUE NO. 24: FALL/WINTER 2019
American Lessons
for starters, how to marinate
dead flesh. see also:
how to sweeten absence.
how to repeat yourself
until your tongue flips
in your mouth, a fish
belly-up against the fire.
fall as both verb & noun,
as what one leaf is doing
& also every tree, unraveling.
a lift as a bridge between
two points, where
none of them is sky.
say elevator. say sidewalk.
say water different than
your mother says it,
cradling the edges inside the bowl
of your mouth.
discover the difference between a body
pillow & a body, pillowed:
how one curls like a comma
between a wall & a spine.
say theater. say apartment.
say that metaphor of
alien as both movie poster
& self-portrait.
fall as both entrance & exit
wound.
Gravity
There are people who believe
in the gravity of a name,
the pull- down weight
of a future foretold. I am
not one of them. It is the East,
& Juliet is the sun with a name.
Zhu Li Ye, we call her, pitching foreign tents
on the cliffs of our tongues.
Mine they trip over like a pair of shoes—
Don’t you have an English name?
Unbraid my hair & my mother’s heart
slips out. I look down to see two birds sitting
in the open basket of my hand.
I think of being Jane, plain,
unquestioned, & my fingers itch
to strangle—
Mama named me after the double,
the echo, the thunder fumbling
through stratospheric ballet, always two steps late.
I’ll say it again: I am not superstitious.
But then Mama calls me from across the Pacific,
holds my name soft in her mouth—
name uncropped,
name unblemished—
& the sky shudders so hard I swear
every bird in a two-mile radius
takes flight.
