Translated by Don Cellini

Look at us there, fermented

between daybreak

               and its chills

the dawn dampens us

with its almost ashen milk

and it moves us

with that glamour of things

that rot

look at us there, ghosts

and leave us there, wandering

biting the mud

to quench the germ

with our constant thirst

nourishing ourselves

on everything that hurts

and Molly McCully Brown

Under my body’s din,

             a hum that won’t quiet,

I still hear what you’ve hidden

             in all the waves of sound:

each bead of pain

             that buries its head

like a black-legged tick,

             intractable but mine

to nurse or lure with heat.

             Please, tell me

what it means that I’ve grown

             to love the steady sound

of so many kinds of caving in,

             buckling down, the way

a body gives itself away

             like a sullen bride or the runt

who couldn’t latch? I know I’m just

             a hairline crack the music

leaves behind. I love

             the music, though I can’t keep it.

What a thing to trust your life to, a scenic

veneer of solid safety, slashed with blades.

Give me four cubes in a gin and tonic.

Give me salt for sidewalks and lacquered roads.

In London, 1867, the ice

gave way in Regent’s Park, and hundreds fell

into the faithless lake. In a trice

Victorian coats and heavy skirts swelled

with water; boots and skates pulled them down.

They clawed at branches, each other, the frozen shelf,

mad to regain the land. Forty drowned.

So cold it was, the ice resealed itself

and kept them for days, preserved like florists’ wares

under glass, reaching toward the air.

A reprieve: the subsiding of a storm. The withered leaves in the cracks

of the city’s cobblestones, the owl slams its head again and again

against the glass doors of the new coffee shop.

A chipped gimcrack inside my palm, a needle searching for a thimble:

because I know the names of every street in this city,

                                     I resist nomenclatures.

A truce, a never-ending interim: the subsiding of a storm.

A locust drags a bullock cart across the tramline.

I see you standing

                                     in the far end of the alley,

almost invisible: crouching behind the abandoned alabaster cherubs.

You are carving a constellation out of the bones, stolen from an incomplete

museum. An incomplete museum, an abandoned excavation site,

a notebook with nothing but inkstains:

                                     yet, when translated, this is an illuminating picture.

Where in this symmetry of blue-ink grief to look

for pronouns that would house my loud dissipations?

Anyone who makes tasty food has to be a good person,

            because think of all the love that goes into cooking:

salt and pepper, sprinkle a little extra cheese, and pop open a bottle

            of Syrah, or if we’re eating at my parents’ in Las Vegas,

we’re drinking Tsingtao beer, my father’s favorite, and he adds more

            bamboo shoots and straw mushrooms and baby corn,

and fun fact: When I was a baby, I’d eat only corn and carrot-flavored

            mush, and now, my dad adds more to the Buddha’s Delight,

a vegetarian dish from China, and I think about my aunt

            in Hong Kong, who, once a year, buys fish from restaurants,

only to release them back into the sea—eat tofu,

            save a life—but back to the dinner scene in Vegas,

my mom is making her Cantonese lobster, extra garlic and ginger,

            and I grew up licking lobster shells for their sauce,

I grew up waking up during summer vacations

            to my mother wearing a headband, warding off the grease

from cooking crabs and shrimps, heads intact, and there’s something, just something

            about my parents’ cooking that makes me feel

a little more like a Chinese girl, because I don’t live in Hong Kong,

            and unlike my cousins, my daily stop isn’t Bowring Street Station,

where I could pick up fresh mango cake before it’s sold out,

            or what about chocolate mousse cake in the shape of a bunny

or mini–dome cakes shaped like cows and pigs

            or cakes shaped like watermelons and shikwasa and citrus mikans,

and who wouldn’t want custard egg tarts or hot dogs

            wrapped in sweet bread or sesame balls, washing it all down

with cream soda, and I feel like that little Chinese girl

            in Kowloon again, getting picked up by my grandpa

after preschool, ready to go junk shopping, and I’d come home

            with shrimp crackers and a toy turtle aquarium and a snowman

painting and a dozen roses, and no, I don’t even like flowers anymore,

            but there’s something, just something about thrifting

with my grandpa now at age twenty-eight that makes me feel

            so Chinese Girl, the way he bargains in the stalls,

asking for the best, “How much for that Murakami-era Louis Vuitton belt?”

            or “What about this vintage Armani?”

and it’s like that look he gives me at dim sum, after the sampler

            of shumai and har gow and chicken feet and char siu bao comes,

and he tells me to eat everything, watches me chow down on

            Chinese ravioli, and that face of his freezes in the moment:

“Eat more, eat more, eat more. Are you happy?”

            And oh, Grandpa, I’m so happy I could eat forever.

moustached, bejeweled, or bejowled,

peer from the walls. A pinched cigarette

burns and smoke threads the afternoon.

No calling cards await on a silver tray

& being painted bores them too:

Men in tennis whites or one whose hand

weights the globed newel post

or home from the hunt in pink coat

and canary vest, riding crop clutched

in a gloved hand—the waiting day

a bright gleam on his black boots.

Behind him, the gilt frame of another scene

and a casement window that must open

on pedigreed pets, horses, and markets

waiting to be mastered. What will he mount

next? Somewhere a sailboat creaks against

a dock or the open eye of a canoe is beached

at the edge of a pond still as the hopelessly

lazy Mlle G, shoulders chalky with powder,

posed in the palm court, where bulbs break

into bloom, the white throats of daffodils

frilled as lace that lines her cuffs

while she dreams of chapel bells and school,

back bay clubs, an island braceleted

by seas, and pygmy deer they shot

and stuffed one season. Across from her,

a young mistress of the breakfast nook

peels an impossible sun. The rind unfurls

on the tablecloth’s vast winter, a snowfield

for two more oranges and a dish of melon

sliced to smiles. Upstairs, unpainted spaniels

loll that were bred to fill the space a body

makes, and a clamshell case closes on its string

of pearls. Let those who owned the world

sneer or sigh. Now they’re simply owned.

It’s a long, long lane

that has no turning

It’s a fire

that always keeps on burning ... 

Sure as you were born

to die.

—Bessie Smith

It’s just another requiem for Ragtown Ragers

where we’re all sons & sometimes-daughters

of part-time Baptist preachers. Our nightly high

hyphenated by Bobby Knuckles backing

his pickup too damn far up & onto this Christmas-light-

lit porch where you’d rollick over a slurred sea

of neon lighters firing up enough 305s to drown a toddler

in smoke. Goddamn if that ain’t exactly

what Tammi Miami (named on account ’cause

sure as brimstone and shitfire if she ain’t escaping

to the Magic City real soon) Goddamn if she isn’t

slowroasting her unborn son—of a shotgun

wedding in that crockpot cradled

beneath crossed arms. “Tam, you s-shouldn’t

s-s-shouldn’t,” Tyler taps his nose. Damn if he doesn’t

got more ticks than a midsummer’s deer carcass.

“Shouldn’t what, Slick?” True, Tammi likes him

well enough but damn if her gaze ain’t tempered glass.

Tyler leaning, right peach-pleased & dragging deep

he flicks the soggy slug of cigarette grassward:

“Ta-am, you shouldn’t wear a b-bandanna as a shirt.” She flips

Tyler the middle acrylic, ruby as her ruddy bandanna top.

Damn if them nights weren’t a flurry of schwagy shooting

stars across the warped wood of a thousand porch boughs.

& how we howled: pack of coyotes circling an absent moon. Feeling

we’d bent the bars of its orange irons & finally, basking in the light.

My unmothered bird,

dropped from the sky

             like a millstone.

If you outlive the fall,

crawl from your crater

like the second coming,

             like the swell of new growth

after fire: just briars and briars

and briars.

So it is quite different, then, if in a mountain town

the mountains are close, rather than far. Here

they are far, their distance away established,

consistent year to year, like a parent’s

or sibling’s. They have their own music.

So I confess I do not know what it’s like,

listening to mountains up close, like a lover,

the silence of them known, not guessed at.