I commune with the text by way of railing against the text
The molecular processes of you are never finished
I move through air in the early fall, a cooling spittle, high heat
days are gone
When the troops leave the replica city, you see that its
battlements are written in green
A Western style of defense, no birds, all men
Same plaza, white stones, black columns, no memory
You want to walk along the path meant for military vehicles
and are denied
You want to try falling down where others had before you, and
are unceremoniously denied
You wanted permission to travel to the mainland to see your
mother
All of your desires were completely impractical
That is, you did not want to atone for anything you had done
Copyright © 2015 by Wendy Xu. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 12, 2015, by the Academy of American Poets.