National Poetry Month Day 1: Kenji C. Liu
When I cough during the pandemic
I am without a doubt my particular body / suggestive of
a rabid bat biting a wild boar biting a chicken
bloody. Bystanders fortify behind walls of toilet paper / enact
dreams of an uncrossable national enclosure. My body
gets killed off before the (white male) star / I am a repository
for his panic. His body (though just as animal) makes small sad
noises. In the finale, my body dies so that his can realize / its
humanity.
Fanged, my body rises from death, licks that bloody chicken / wraps
itself in a murmuration of vapor and droplets. Where I go
also goes centuries of institutionalized innuendo. The star runs
for his life so my body runs too / stumbles / reorients at something
lovely beyond the ruin though we are each an unnatural self / a headless
-ness marching with tiny flag and cocktail umbrella. We bodies
are in the wet market, exposed to the bureaucracy of ghosts
unable to touch or return touch. Each of us / our own sick
country. I believe in ghosts because my body is a host
for their poems. Each day, they write me / a new—
***
Photograph of Kenji Liu by Maya Washington.