13 Jul 2020: "Cut" by Sylvia Plath
"Cut"
What a thrill -
My thumb instead of an onion.
The top quite gone
Except for a sort of hinge
Of skin,
A flap like a hat,
Dead white.
Then that red plush.
Little pilgrim,
The Indian's axed your scalp.
Your turkey wattle
Carpet rolls
Straight from the heart.
I step on it,
Clutching my bottle
Of pink fizz. A celebration, this is.
Out of a gap
A million soldiers run,
Redcoats, every one.
Whose side are they on?
O my
Homunculus, I am ill.
I have taken a pill to kill
The thin
Papery feeling.
Saboteur,
Kamikaze man -
The stain on your
Gauze Ku Klux Klan
Babushka
Darkens and tarnishes and when
The balled
Pulp of your heart
Confronts its small
Mill of silence
How you jump -
Trepanned veteran,
Dirty girl,
Thumb stump.
12 Jul 2020: "Tulips" by Sylvia Plath
Tulips
By Sylvia Plath
The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.
Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.
I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.
I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses
And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons.
They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff
Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut.
Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.
The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble,
They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps,
Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another,
So it is impossible to tell how many there are.
My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water
Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.
They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.
Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage——
My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,
My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;
Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.
I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat
stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.
They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.
Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley
I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books
Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head.
I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.
I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free——
The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,
And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.
It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them
Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.
The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.
Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe
Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.
Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.
They are subtle : they seem to float, though they weigh me down,
Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color,
A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.
Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.
The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me
Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,
And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow
Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,
And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.
The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.
Before they came the air was calm enough,
Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.
Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.
Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river
Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.
They concentrate my attention, that was happy
Playing and resting without committing itself.
The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves.
The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals;
They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat,
And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes
Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.
The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,
And comes from a country far away as health.
11 Jul 2020: "Lady Lazarus" by Sylvia Plath
Lady Lazarus
by
I have done it again. One year in every ten I manage it_____ A sort of walking miracle, my skin Bright as a Nazi lampshade, My right foot A paperweight, My face featureless, fine Jew linen. Peel off the napkin O my enemy. Do I terrify?------- The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth? The sour breath Will vanish in a day. Soon, soon the flesh The grave cave ate will be At home on me And I a smiling woman. I am only thirty. And like the cat I have nine times to die. This is Number Three. What a trash To annihilate each decade. What a million filaments. The Peanut-crunching crowd Shoves in to see Them unwrap me hand in foot ------ The big strip tease. Gentleman , ladies These are my hands My knees. I may be skin and bone, Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman. The first time it happened I was ten. It was an accident. The second time I meant To last it out and not come back at all. I rocked shut As a seashell. They had to call and call And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls. Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call. It's easy enough to do it in a cell. It's easy enough to do it and stay put. It's the theatrical Comeback in broad day To the same place, the same face, the same brute Amused shout: 'A miracle!' That knocks me out. There is a charge For the eyeing my scars, there is a charge For the hearing of my heart--- It really goes. And there is a charge, a very large charge For a word or a touch Or a bit of blood Or a piece of my hair on my clothes. So, so, Herr Doktor. So, Herr Enemy. I am your opus, I am your valuable, The pure gold baby That melts to a shriek. I turn and burn. Do not think I underestimate your great concern. Ash, ash--- You poke and stir. Flesh, bone, there is nothing there---- A cake of soap, A wedding ring, A gold filling. Herr God, Herr Lucifer Beware Beware. Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air. (1962)
10 July 2020: "The Applicant" by Syvlia Plath
The Applicant by Sylvia Plath, from Ariel
First, are you our sort of a person?
Do you wear
A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch,
A brace or a hook,
Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch,
Stitches to show something's missing? No, no? Then
How can we give you a thing?
Stop crying.
Open your hand.
Empty? Empty. Here is a hand
To fill it and willing
To bring teacups and roll away headaches
And do whatever you tell it.
Will you marry it?
It is guaranteed
To thumb shut your eyes at the end
And dissolve of sorrow.
We make new stock from the salt.
I notice you are stark naked.
How about this suit——
Black and stiff, but not a bad fit.
Will you marry it?
It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof
Against fire and bombs through the roof.
Believe me, they'll bury you in it.
Now your head, excuse me, is empty.
I have the ticket for that.
Come here, sweetie, out of the closet.
Well, what do you think of that?
Naked as paper to start
But in twenty-five years she'll be silver,
In fifty, gold.
A living doll, everywhere you look.
It can sew, it can cook,
It can talk, talk, talk.
It works, there is nothing wrong with it.
You have a hole, it's a poultice.
You have an eye, it's an image.
My boy, it's your last resort.
Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.
5 May 2020: "Music Box" by JORGE LUIS BORGES
Music of Japan. Parsimoniously
from the water clock the drops unfold
in lazy honey or ethereal gold
that over time reiterates a weave
eternal, fragile, enigmatic, bright.
I fear that every one will be the last.
They are a yesterday come from the past.
But from what shrine, from what mountain’s slight
garden, what vigils by an unknown sea,
and from what modest melancholy, from
what lost and rediscovered afternoon
do they arrive at their far future: me?
Who knows? No matter. When I hear it play
I am. I want to be. I bleed away.
1 May 2020: "We thirst at first..." by Emily Dickinson
| WE thirst at first,—’t is Nature’s act; | |
| And later, when we die, | |
| A little water supplicate | |
| Of fingers going by. | |
| It intimates the finer want, | 5 |
| Whose adequate supply | |
| Is that great water in the west | |
| Termed immortality. -Emily Dickinson |
20 Feb 2020: "Lao Jia 老家" BY WANG PING
At fifteen, my father ran away from his widowed mother to fight the Japanese.
“I’ll come back with a PhD and serve my country with better English and knowledge,” I pledged at the farewell party in Beijing.
Home — 家 — Jia: a roof under which animals live.
When asked where I’m from,
I say “Weihai,” even though
nobody knows where it is,
even though I’ve never been to the place.
He lost his left ear in a bayonet fight with a Japanese soldier. Two years later, American cannons split his eardrums.
The night I arrived at JFK, the Mets won the World Series and the noise on the street went on till dawn. I got up and went to work in my sponsor’s antique shop in Manhattan.
The bag lady stopped her cart on the busy street and peed onto a subway grate.
“Did you jump or fly?” asked my landlady from her mah-jongg table. Then she laughed and told me that her husband had jumped ship ten years ago. When he opened his fifth Chinese takeout, he bought her a passport and flew her to Queens.
The only thing he liked to talk about was his old home, Weihai, its plump sea cucumbers and sweet apples, men with broad shoulders, thick thighs, and girls with long braids making steamed bread.
“Back home, I had no money, but I never felt poor,” she said, shivering behind her fruit stand. “Here, if my money goes down below four figures, I panic.” She scanned the snow-covered streets of Chinatown. “I guess I really don’t want to be homeless here.”
I hired the babysitter when she mentioned her hometown was Weihai.
The president visited the rice paddies in Vietnam where a pilot had been downed thirty-three years ago.
My father tried to return to Weihai after his discharge from the Navy. With his rank, he could find work only in a coal mine town nearby. My mother refused to go. He went alone, and got sick with TB. Mother ordered me to date the county administrator’s son so he could help father come home.
“No, I’m not sad.” The street kid shook her head.
“How can I miss something I’ve never had?”
On her sixtieth birthday, my grandma went home to die, sailing from the island to Shanghai, from Shanghai to Yantai, then two buses to Weihai. I carried her onto the big ship at the Shanghai Port, down to the bottom, where she’d spend three days on a mattress, on the floor, with hundreds of fellow passengers. “How are you going to make it, Grandma?” I asked. She pulled out a pair of embroidered shoes from her parcel and placed them between my feet. “My heart and liver, come to 老家 soon, before it’s too late.”
House — 房 — fang: a door over a square, a place, a direction.
He never lost his accent, never learned Mandarin or the island dialect.
Weihai, a small city
in Shandong Province,
on the coast of the North China Sea,
a home, where my grandfather
and his father were born,
where my grandma married,
raised her children, and
now lies in the yam fields,
nameless, next to her husband,
an old frontier to fend off Japanese pirates,
a place I come from, have never seen.
It’s my 老家 lao jia, old home.
Back from America, my mother furnished her home on the island, bought an apartment in a suburb of Shanghai, and is seeking a third one in Beijing. “A cunning rabbit needs three holes,” she wrote to us, demanding our contributions.
They swore, before boarding the ship, that they’d send money home to bring more relatives over; in return, they were promised that if they died, their bodies would be sent back home for burial.
I drink American milk — a few drops in tea.
I eat American rice — Japanese brand.
Chinese comes to me only in dreams — in black-and-white pictures.
My mother buried her husband on the island, where he lived for forty years.
Room — 屋 — wu: a body unnamed and homeless until it finds a destination.
We greet a stranger with
“Where are you from?”
When we meet a friend on the street, we say,
“Where have you been? Where are you going?”
家 — a roof under which animals live
房 — a door over a square, a place, a direction
屋 — a body unnamed and homeless until it finds a destination
— my tangled roots for old home.
“I’ll come back with a PhD and serve my country with better English and knowledge,” I pledged at the farewell party in Beijing.
Home — 家 — Jia: a roof under which animals live.
When asked where I’m from,
I say “Weihai,” even though
nobody knows where it is,
even though I’ve never been to the place.
He lost his left ear in a bayonet fight with a Japanese soldier. Two years later, American cannons split his eardrums.
The night I arrived at JFK, the Mets won the World Series and the noise on the street went on till dawn. I got up and went to work in my sponsor’s antique shop in Manhattan.
The bag lady stopped her cart on the busy street and peed onto a subway grate.
“Did you jump or fly?” asked my landlady from her mah-jongg table. Then she laughed and told me that her husband had jumped ship ten years ago. When he opened his fifth Chinese takeout, he bought her a passport and flew her to Queens.
The only thing he liked to talk about was his old home, Weihai, its plump sea cucumbers and sweet apples, men with broad shoulders, thick thighs, and girls with long braids making steamed bread.
“Back home, I had no money, but I never felt poor,” she said, shivering behind her fruit stand. “Here, if my money goes down below four figures, I panic.” She scanned the snow-covered streets of Chinatown. “I guess I really don’t want to be homeless here.”
I hired the babysitter when she mentioned her hometown was Weihai.
The president visited the rice paddies in Vietnam where a pilot had been downed thirty-three years ago.
My father tried to return to Weihai after his discharge from the Navy. With his rank, he could find work only in a coal mine town nearby. My mother refused to go. He went alone, and got sick with TB. Mother ordered me to date the county administrator’s son so he could help father come home.
“No, I’m not sad.” The street kid shook her head.
“How can I miss something I’ve never had?”
On her sixtieth birthday, my grandma went home to die, sailing from the island to Shanghai, from Shanghai to Yantai, then two buses to Weihai. I carried her onto the big ship at the Shanghai Port, down to the bottom, where she’d spend three days on a mattress, on the floor, with hundreds of fellow passengers. “How are you going to make it, Grandma?” I asked. She pulled out a pair of embroidered shoes from her parcel and placed them between my feet. “My heart and liver, come to 老家 soon, before it’s too late.”
House — 房 — fang: a door over a square, a place, a direction.
He never lost his accent, never learned Mandarin or the island dialect.
Weihai, a small city
in Shandong Province,
on the coast of the North China Sea,
a home, where my grandfather
and his father were born,
where my grandma married,
raised her children, and
now lies in the yam fields,
nameless, next to her husband,
an old frontier to fend off Japanese pirates,
a place I come from, have never seen.
It’s my 老家 lao jia, old home.
Back from America, my mother furnished her home on the island, bought an apartment in a suburb of Shanghai, and is seeking a third one in Beijing. “A cunning rabbit needs three holes,” she wrote to us, demanding our contributions.
They swore, before boarding the ship, that they’d send money home to bring more relatives over; in return, they were promised that if they died, their bodies would be sent back home for burial.
I drink American milk — a few drops in tea.
I eat American rice — Japanese brand.
Chinese comes to me only in dreams — in black-and-white pictures.
My mother buried her husband on the island, where he lived for forty years.
Room — 屋 — wu: a body unnamed and homeless until it finds a destination.
We greet a stranger with
“Where are you from?”
When we meet a friend on the street, we say,
“Where have you been? Where are you going?”
家 — a roof under which animals live
房 — a door over a square, a place, a direction
屋 — a body unnamed and homeless until it finds a destination
— my tangled roots for old home.
19 Feb 2020: "SPLEEN 3: Supreme White" BY LARISSA LAI
abdominal and/or epigastric pain, digestive issues, heart pain
could the opium have gone bananas
tripped a deeper horror?
say the chiu chau defeat the green gang
take control of the comprador colony
make a chungking mansion
out of every high-rise tower
n tu yueh-sheng n chiang kai-shek
kick mao tse-tung in his long march
and blast chinese workers back
to american levels of oppression
fragrant harbor as chicago of the east
all the girls go suzie
and a thousand gross-out william holdens
fantan the port
reveals america’s fascist sympathies sooner
land of the free goes all man in the high tower
and china industrializes quicker
on gangster cash
enters the arms race
and puts mutual assured destruction on notice
what reversal would right its left then?
say hannah arendt waxes total recall
n chow yun-fat schwarzeneggers
our cyborg asses all the way to daddy cool
too cool for nuclear winter school
18 Feb 2020: "Zoo" BY CATHY PARK HONG
Ga The fishy consonant,
Na The monkey vowel.
Da The immigrant’s tongue
as shrill or guttural.
Overture of my voice like the flash of bats.
The hyena babble and apish libretto.
Piscine skin, unblinking eyes.
Sideshow invites foreigner with the animal hide.
Alveolar tt, sibilant ss, and glottal hh
shi: poem
kkatchi: magpie
ayi: child
Words with an atavistic tail. History’s thorax considerably
cracked. The Hottentot click called undeveloped.
Mother and Father obsessed with hygiene:
as if to rid themselves of their old third world smell.
Labial bs and palatal ts:
La the word
Ma speaks
Ba without you
I dreamed a Korean verse, a past conversation
with Mother when they said I was blathering unintelligibly
in my sleep.
The mute girl with the baboon’s face unlearned
her vowels and cycled across a rugged phonetic map.
Sa glossary
Ah din
Ja impossible word
Macaws turned into camouflaged moths.
The sky was overcast, the ocean a slate gray
along the wolf-hued sand. I dived into the ocean
swam across channels to islands without flags;
replaced the jingoist’s linotype with my yellowing
canines and shrilled against the anemic angel who
cradled the bells that dictated time and lucid breath.
17 Feb 2020: "They Come" BY CATHY PARK HONG
Stamp the earth rind down,
shuck our boots & nap on
rubber cockscomb pad.
Rise up & ride in,
poles poked through with hide of kid
flap from blither wind.
Ride into a town of tires stacked,
a tarred prehistoric castle.
A town of shacks painted kiwi green
latches guano rimmed.
Road’s a batter of blood & dust.
One serf scurries off cowed & cloaked.
Linseed-eyed & broad of face.
Hold, I say.
She says oh gods once nested on our tire hills
but now that tire factory flakes to tinder too.
Are you here from the world above?
Now come. Heal my kin.
Are you here from the world above?
We douse ourselves with flame retardant
& douse the town to flame.
Are you here from the world above?
We hear her death in flames
We hear other deaths in flames
Along each town we pass
We rave & rove & gore
the last oil rig hidalgo in his tin gilt throne,
His ale we drink, his heart we jar.
We are from the world above,
We sing & jig but like Sisyphus,
as we eye from afar,
as each child crawls out their gutted hole,
& rebuild each dead town —
We can never rest.
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