SPENCER CHANG Poetry | Taipei American School, Taipei, TW
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
SPENCER CHANG Poetry | Taipei American School, Taipei, TW Fishhook / Anchor Ghost Stories (II) a haibun for my Grandpa a sestina for Vincent Chin as you raise me onto the wooden deck, unlatching the fishhook from my shirt, I try to speak, but & they bury their hammers into the cold machine cough up ugly noises instead. amid oceans heavy with summer smog, anything can be turned into like gavels. another hit caves its teeth, lifts myth—you pull me close, cradling me like a fledgling fallen from its nest. I reach for my face only its jaw & black oil brims out. for criminals to touch yours. like these, they say justice. hunched close beneath the streetlight’s drone, they raise their hammers, chant this is our country /// & the TV switches—a reporter suited in blue says good in a room cast still by thunderlight, I wake to a broken oar suspended above my head, the rugged morning America & I profess to be a good bed. look down at your feet & count each callus. from the altar, incense whirls around us a halo. citizen, twist my jaw like a machine yellowed wallpaper unfurls from the ceiling, as if to listen, as if to speak. around the Os & call this country home. leaving for groceries, I saw them lifting /// flags up their front gates. I avoid streetlights, pray my shadow won’t be mistaken for a criminal’s. from you, I learned how to pluck the bones from fishmeat, wring the salt from murmurous waves. now, we’re netting white carps from the sea, eyes gasping wide. I pocket a few to play soothsayer: but I, refusing to speak my prayers in English, I, criminal, foretell the clawing storms, white teeth of currents. even then, there are things only the moon can I, on the streets licking shrines with my dirty tongue, I, good predict, you say, plucking chords from its rods of light. beggar bad immigrant, I, smothered by the streetlights— I fold my arms, announce myself a drowning machine, /// mouth crushed & reassembled a silver ring. I only lift my hands up, palms outwards, when a man asks what country things we find washed up by the shore: a needleless compass, plastic radios without antennas, driftwood sawed off at the ends, to be part of something greater—this fishhook, my anchor. I’m really from, I say our country & he says my country— it’s Friday night & I mistake my reflection for criminal /// again, my tattered jacket fuming with sulfur. still, I lift my right hand & practice my oaths. good on moonless nights, we watch boats illuminate black waters, rudders cleaving into wakes, as waves subject, loyal soldier, obedient worker, open machine, rush in to sew. I imagine a healing like this. let you tinker with my ribs under streetlights /// & you, gilded like a lost savior, make streetlights you used to slow-dance in the living room, swaying to the ocean’s pulse as waves crashed, carving of my eyes. I reach for all the windows, but find a country a little shore to keep for themselves—now skin hardens like bark up your legs. a sparrow in oil, of mirrors. a gunshot in low frequencies, their machine sinking beneath its own feathers. hands pointing everywhere, someone needs to be the criminal— a boy mistakes my prayer for begging & says no good in saving a broken thing. two men lift /// when I found you on the kitchen floor—skin sharpened into scales, neck knifed into gills—I filled their baseball bats & splinter the moon. their cuffs lifted the bathtub with seawater & lifted you in. how much smaller you looked in the room. how much for cracking a skull, smoke turned halos under streetlights. smaller I looked next to you. they dress blood in snow, kiss the dirt, call themselves the good citizen I can never be, my body turned an open country. /// O, dim my mouth, make me faceless, strip the criminal from me—. at the ceremony, I machine full moon turns the shores into mirrors, then silver, & I step into the waves one last time. water rushing into my palms like a third hand, pulling you. the ocean whispers. I whisper back, this is a my hands. I play good. we all pledge. they lift second healing: flags. mouthless machine. dead machine. the streetlights more alive than ever in this country—where anything that moves is a criminal. your hands reaching for the hazy moon & my hands unhooking from yours. 1 2 MEI (CONT’D) It’s good I got all of them, because the taxi driver understood me. It was like I was fluent and everything. And we got to the hostel okay too, the right address and not too much traffic. KATE CHOI PAST MEI, sitting on the box, seems to be looking out a window at a cityscape Play or Script | Seoul Foreign School, Seoul, KR rushing by… her chin resting on her hand, her expression dreamy and excited. Then, as if disembarking from a taxi, PAST MEI gets up from the box. Her invisible suitcase in her hand, she looks around to find a building she recognizes in the imaginary landscape around her. Soon her face lights up and she heads determinedly for an unseen door across the stage… she knocks and waits. An AJUMMA enters from the other side. All’s in the Past Now MEI (CONT’D) I saw it right away. The owner was an ajumma [an older woman], a nice woman who said hello— The stage is bare except for a single box in the center and a stool at the far right. MEI sits on it, crosslegged; her eyes unfocused, uncertain. For a few AJUMMA seconds she sits silent, staring at the audience, looking away and back again. (Bowing, with a smile) Suddenly, she leans forward and speaks—hesitantly at first, but gradually louder and faster. Ahnyeonghasaeyo [hello]. MEI MEI It was hot that day. Just like that! And I said hello back—of course I did. (She pauses.) PAST MEI (Eagerly) It was hot, so hot that day, and it wasn’t the good kind of hot either. Not the kind of hot where the sky is perfectly blue and cloudless, when you know you’re being sunburned but it doesn’t matter to you either way… No, it wasn’t that kind of hot that day. It was the other kind—the humid kind—the kind where the air Ahnyeonghasaeyo! is so thick and sticky it clings to your skin and your clothes, and every breath feels like air you just exhaled. It was so humid that day that even in the airport For a moment it looks like she’s about to extend her hand to shake, but PAST with its high-powered air conditioning I could feel it, right away, and I could just see it outside, behind all the windows and doors. The humidity, it was MEI catches herself and bows quickly instead, a little flustered. AJUMMA everywhere. gestures for PAST MEI to follow her and PAST MEI and AJUMMA both (A long pause… then a deep breath, a contented sigh; she continues exit the stage. rapturously, speaking fast.) MEI My God, it was glorious! It was just like they said it would be! They’d told me the summers were humid after the rains, and they were right. I mean, I knew (Leaning forward, suddenly a little anxious) they were right—my friend Ara and her parents, that is—I never doubted that they were right, when I heard them tell their stories growing up—but it was I almost forgot to bow, though. That was stupid of me. I never thought I’d forget to bow! I always bowed to Ara’s parents when I went over. It’s a Chinese different to know they were right… to stand there and feel it and know they were right and know it because I was there. I was there! And it was just as I thing, too, you know. It’s all down to respect. I suppose I was just out of practice, since in America we don’t bow, and it’d been so long since I last saw Ara’s had expected it would be… just as they had told me it would be… it was a sign. It had to be a sign… it was all right, exactly right. parents… Anyway. MEI jumps up from her stool and crosses the stage rapidly. At the other side From behind MEI, PAST MEI reenters, looking around expectantly. she turns and paces back again, and sits back down, crosslegged, but now PAST MEI enters, pulling an imaginary suitcase behind her. She walks quickly MEI (CONT’D) back and forth a few times, stopping once to shake out her loose hair and tie it I dropped off my things, and I knew I had to go and eat—Ara’s parents always had homemade Korean food for me to eat—so I went to the first Korean up against the imaginary heat—she stops and sticks her hand out to the side, restaurant I found. There weren’t many people around, but I said hello to everyone I did see. waving, staring at something the audience cannot see. PAST MEI MEI (CONT’D) (Walking slowly back and forth, smiling and bowing) And it was even more humid outside, but— Ahnyeonghasaeyo—ahnyeonghasaeyo—ahnyeonghasaeyo. PAST MEI TAXI! TAXI! MEI They all said it back, too, and— Seeing an invisible taxi heading her way, PAST MEI pulls her hand back.