“How hard it is to sleep in the middle of a life” —Audre Lorde
We wake in the middle of a life, hungry. We smear durian along our mouths, sing soft death a lullaby. Carcass breath, eros of licked fingers and the finest perfume. What is love if not rot? We wear the fruit’s hull as a spiked crown, grinning in green armor. Death to the grub, fat in his milky shuffle! Death to the lawlessness of dirt! Death to mud and its false chocolate! To the bloated sun we want to slice open and yolk all over the village. We want a sun-drenched slug feast, an omelet loosening its folds like hot Jell-O. We want the marbled fat of steak and all its swirling pink galaxies. We want the drool, the gnash, the pluck of each corn kernel, raw and summer swell. Tears welling up oil. Order up! Pickled cucumbers piled like logs for a fire, like fat limbs we pepper and succulent in. Order up: shrimp chips curling in a porcelain bowl like subway seats. Grapes peeled from bitter bark – almost translucent, like eyes we would rather see. Little girl, what do you leave, leaven in your sight? Death to the open eyes of the dying. Here, there are so many open eyes we can’t close each one. No, we did not say the steamed eye of a fish. No eyelids fluttering like no butterfly wings. No purple yam lips. We said eyes. Still and resolute as a heartbreaker. Does this break your heart? Look, we don’t want to be rude, but seconds, please. Want: globes of oranges swallowed whole like a basketball or Mars or whatever planet is the most delicious. Slather Saturn! Ferment Mercury! Lap up its film of dust! Seconds, thirds, fourths! Meat wool! A bouquet of chicken feet! A garden of melons, monstrous in their bulge! Prune back nothing. We purr in this garden. We comb through berries and come out so blue. Little girl, lasso tofu, the rope slicing its belly clean. Deep fry a cloud so it tastes like bitter gourd or your father leaving – the exhaust of his car, charred. Serenade a snake and slither its tongue into yours and bite. Love! What is love if not knotted in garlic? Child, we move through graves like eels, delicious with our heads first, our mouths agape. Our teeth: little needles to stitch a factory of everything made in China. You ask: are you hungry? Hunger eats through the air like ozone. You ask: what does it mean to be rootless? Roots are good to use as toothpicks. You: how can you wake in the middle of a life? We shut and open our eyes like the sun shining on tossed pennies in a forgotten well. Bald copper, blood. Yu choy bolts into roses down here. While you were sleeping, we woke to the old leaves of your backyard shed and ate that and one of your lost flip flops too. In a future life, we saw rats overtake a supermarket with so much milk, we turned opaque. We wake to something boiling. We wake to wash dirt from lettuce, to blossom into your face. Aphids along the lashes. Little girl, don’t forget to take care of the chickens, squawking in their mess and stench. Did our mouths buckle at the sight of you devouring slice after slice of pizza and the greasy box too? Does this frontier swoon for you? It’s time to wake up. Wake the tapeworm who loves his home. Wake the ants, let them do-si-do a spoonful of peanut butter. Tell us, little girl, are you hungry, awake, astonished enough?
It took me two years to gather the courage, the spirit, and the hot-sesame-oil breath to write this poem. This poem ends my forthcoming book, "How to Not Be Afraid of Everything" (Alice James, 2021). In this book, I have a series where I speak directly to my ancestors who were lost during the Great Leap Forward (1958-1962); this is the only poem where they speak back to me. In speaking to me, I love that they decide to throw a massive feast. They are voracious, joyous, and impossibly hungry. I feel comforted by this poem, by my ghosts.
"As you reread the poem, the more echoes and echoes of echoes become audible. The narrow sparseness of the structure seems mimetic, and the reader finds themselves climbing the stairs of the empty flat, and hearing many distant footsteps."
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"One verse in particular left me unsatisfied with my translation: 'pasan bajo el calor de mi ventana' became 'pass beneath my sweltry window.' 'Sweltry' is a weighty word, and I imagine the nuns suffering under their frocks in the Caribbean heat, but 'calor' remits to human warmth, even tenderness, those things—like the smell of used books and towels and the entangled scent of incense—that are of the flesh."
