2020

Heidi Wong

 

you lose seeing the snow melt one last time.

lose your corner room in the gray cement building,

 

lose friends, lose childhood, lose new york, lose

him. you witness distance spreading

 

beyond distance. you learn

distance becomes distance by feeding

 

on your ability to see it. all it takes is one person

to give up. he takes the jewels of your irises

 

and says i don’t care. you try to starve,

but the dead brother inside your stomach

 

demands food. the grief

just won’t cut it.

 

isolation wraps around your neck like a lover.

would you leave, even if you could? where would you

 

go? two weeks later you are so yourself

it’s frightening. hope sinks

 

into your skin like light. at night,

sometimes, only sometimes, like a blade

 

scraping away gemstone fantasies. would you

leave, even if you could? where would you

 

go? your home

that was never your home bursts

 

into flame and you are at the beach for daddy’s birthday,

pretending your friends aren’t losing their fingers to gunfire.

 

you say be careful when you mean

i love you.

 

you say when they bring out the gas start running when you mean

i love you. you say don’t be a hero when you mean

 

i can’t lose you,

too.

 

a man dies on camera. and across the pacific

an orchestra of coarse, frozen throats begins to remember

 

it still has a voice to speak with. a voice

stretching to silver lakes, casting the shape of the future.

 

maybe heaven births itself

from the mouths that mourn your absence.

 

maybe death is the only commonality

mankind can agree on.

 

a black man is murdered on camera,

and one of the officers wears your uncle’s face.

 

your uncle who boards the flight and does not return

till two years after nana gets lowered

 

into our motherland. he comforts himself

in a white man’s country, thinking

 

she wouldn’t have remembered me anyways.

the last thing nana called for was her son.

 

a girl who looks like you,

could have been you, is

 

you, bleeds in the street. they call her dirty chinese,

and it’s the first time in seven years you wished

 

you were white. your western home

threatens your eastern home

 

and you go to sleep wondering,

if you had to gouge one of your eyes out,

 

which would you choose? pray

for the rustle of autumn in clinton.

 

but normal is a hand with missing fingers,

the new family that never learned your name.

 

you know you can, someday might even,

for real this time, unashamed this time,

 

without fear this time,

love. but what good is that now?