I Guess Everyone’s Asian These Days
As if the world was only a window. As if every crop
in a strange continent bloomed the same fruit,
plum-sweet & unpoisoned. As if anything made
of meat was made to be eaten. As if
it wasn’t enough that the body is a cage.
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Motoko Kusanagi knows how to be less than flesh muzzled with knives
to see through eyes slant angled for kill wounds on the right face invite grief wounds on her face invite pale hands hurt made foreign
a pretty dress to slip into disarm dis embody her skin too
a doorway history now broken furniture weighed in bone white paint
made habitable made habit the walls bordered with bleach
lined with mirrors of course to see inside her you have to see yourself
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As if wearing fresh pelt is to be the animal itself.
As if a hunter could sleep despite the pursuit
of a blue-eyed knife. As if a scream were not
its own language. As if hollowing my throat
wasn’t how I learned to speak.
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to speak the name that leashes me is to own my body to own
another’s name is to invent animal Michael skins Yi-Fen Chou
sews his meat into fabric a country worn for years Michael watches
white men like him tape their eyes skyward as if to escape skin now
smothered with yellow cheap enough to wash off on television
Charlie Chan solves mysteries of men inventing colour inventing animals the thrill of play-acting weapons that can never kill you
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As if grief could be made beautiful by touch.
As if to teeth blood-fresh incisors is to speak
new language. As if captive things grow to love
hunger. As if finding my face in the water
wasn’t all it meant to see.
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see: Lena the biologist see: chink see: aperture opening through which
light passes through a camera see: aesthetic an ornament to touch
see: proximity nearness see: interchangeable bodies the same colour
bordering on see: border breath-thin division see: Chinese Exclusion Act see: act see: pretense see: polite see: appropriate
see: usurp see: replace see: chink see: breach meaning animal breaking the surface of water to breathe
How to Win the Appropriation Prize
Write this / a white woman reinvents doorways / into my country via
conquering / army of fists / write a flood / of gapes telegraphing / indifference
with precision / bona fide post-racial / audience to exhibit of land/mine &
trespass / write all those useless sorrys / vulturing a gutted horizon / & under
it a girl’s lies / warbling ocean to the colony / where her mother sleeps /
unbruised for now / & then write yourself / brave witness / recreate the Sad
Chink Cinematic / my grief made luminous / ticket to critics’ gold stars /
ovations / an airborne bullet / built to bridge water / & rain soldiers / write
this: / one year ago / white men cleaved / through my friend’s body / & found
the ledger / of lives they owned / can you pronounce / her birth name
perfectly / language the distance / between someone I love / & the next
chokehold / after all you’ve harvested / scream for sand / abetting for
applause / write my pelt gorgeous / & blood-warm / the voyeuristic thrill / of
owning something / by being inside it / now I am beautiful / surgery in your
grand / invention finally made real / because you stroked me / with ink-damp
hands / my story is unbearable / because it bears my body / which bears my
life / which is also unbearable / my life is unbearable / there I said that / my
life is / unbearable elsewhere / in an echoing classroom / a writing professor /
swears that true poems / are built from tactile nouns / he’s looking at you /
when he says / something’s / only good / when it lets itself / be touched
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Photograph of Natalie Wee by May Truong.
