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you’re a maraschino cherry girl / she said / it wasn’t a compliment
to sweat with existence among the fellow wretched, / or to sleep with untimely dreams, distant echoes of nothing, / of unbeing. / no resolution.
This is an English translation of a Chinese translation of the Russian folk song. My mother sang this around the house growing up, and I have fond memories of it.
I couldn’t quite pinpoint when we had first met, or where he was from. It was as if I’d known him since the first time I opened my eyes to the world. Every moment my mother was not by my side, this man had been there.
I will become it, and it will become me, and together we will lay in silence.
Inspired by the New York Times article, “There Are Holes on the Ocean Floor. Scientists Don’t Know Why” by Christine Chung.
“I try to point out the tears to those who do have the energy. They’re around if you know where to look.”
I am simpler / than I imagined myself to be. / I am not immune to the motions / of the stars.
How one community’s endeavor to survive is challenged by the death of their island.
“eager eyes devoured cherry lip gloss I / mistook hunger for appetite realized / in praise of unrequited love and loss”
“I prepared myself / washed my brain nine times a day / lobe after lobe after lobe / until my skin burgeoned red”
his skin melted / away his bones / melted away / and at the end of the slaughter / a puddle of sand / lay at the boy’s feet
“The smell of lavender, like her perfume which she sprayed in hotel rooms, in rental cars, / like in Santa Fe where the wheels broke down and we finally faced the sky”
“Mount onto freedom like a finally uncaged creature. / Know your mind and its terrible tendency to deceive you.”
“I wish to cling to an Immortal to roam, to catch the brilliant moon and live forever. I know this cannot be and so I entrust this fading echo to the sorrowful wind.”
“The land was flat and vast with houses and buildings neatly arranged. One could see things like fertile fields, beautiful ponds, trees of mulberry and bamboo.”
“i believe all the people in the world deserve to be happy at least once. i wish someone believed in me. i think that would make things easier. i wish i had softer skin.”
“She has planned and waited and scheduled and stressed in the time leading up to this moment—the moment in which Dr. Gill will be with her. She knows exactly what she wants to say.”
“I don’t think of myself as an angel, but as a shepherd. I guide people from one place to another.”
“On these cloudless days, / you erect me in the sky / at the mercy of a dance / I so fiercely despise.”
Admittedly I don’t fit quite right in this shoe / But I am me / I am me / Brown-skinned and free
“you scream at birds until your throat is a strip of orange peel perforated at both ends but they don’t scream back. their vocal chords weren’t built for articulating sadness. yours were.”
“In the early morning twilight, just as their long, desperate nights are packing themselves up…Mila awakes, always gagging up bile, always feeling that she is paying some estranged debt.”
“standing there surrounded by strangers and snow and dry afternoon sun, i pretend there’s something in my eyes and wipe them with the back of my hands until everything’s blurry.”
I will forget that her favorite color is brown.
I will forget her mother,
I will forget her name.