Author: anmly_mpusod

This Too is a Poem is a Prayer, Unclasping

over the crest of memory:

O gold-rimmed matzo: tremble.
O teeth; stigmata—

then I peel the hard-boiled egg of my own grief.
& what is life but a breaking in

                    someone’s hands?

Somewhere 
                   fireflies limn the shore of 
his limbs celestine. I rend as I remember 
I no longer god-walk this sea. 

                          Nor rest the weary hind legs of 
a kiss by his ear, 

                           breath unbridled 

from the silt-slippery conch-shell of my body:
                                   listen. Hold me and listen 
to an ocean 
                                                   thrashing—

How to wring myself out of this washcloth of remembrance? 
I have sopped up the last of his gravy. I am

                            stained      by his laugh.
On my skin on his skin.

& what is love but a seeping in

of sorts?

A running under water, 

                    a gentle rub, 

                                                a squeeze,

a laying out?

Originally appeared in Tigers Zine.

 

Letitia Jiju is an Indian poet who through her work explores the intermingling of mother tongue, religion & generational trauma. Her poems have appeared/are forthcoming in trampset, ANMLY, The Lumiere Review, Moist Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She reads poetry for Psaltery & Lyre. Find her on Instagram/Twitter @eaturlettuce.

 

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Idols

Perfect Blue (1997), a film by Satoshi Kon

These women who perform as idols, who feel like friends, enter the stage. The white ribbons on their bare shoulders and the pink of their crinoline skirts flutter as they dance and sing. 

These women who perform as idols are ballerinas— I mean, schoolgirls—I mean, Sailor Scouts—
Do they know that this audience of exclusively men—and me—have a soft spot for women who wear bows in their hair, who smile with enthusiasm? 

These women who perform as girls dance in perfect unison, crooning their siren song: Look! Can you see her white wings? Those eyes gazing at you. That sweet voice, and those gentle hands. They exist only for you. 

All the men are watching and some of the men are taking photos and some of the other men are holding camcorders, recording every breath and every twirl.

I’m no better than these sallow, indoor-skinned men—just more beautiful—After all, don’t I have an affinity for small hands too? Doesn’t the fire in my body long to know the fire in theirs too? 

 

Simulation

Perfect Blue (1997), a film by Satoshi Kon

The actor says I’m sorry before the scene begins.

The actress smiles a dazzling smile and says It’s okay.

A camera crew surrounds them. The flashing lights are relentless. 

The director yells Action and it begins. He towers over her. Her body flails.  

The director yells Cut and it stops. He towers over her. Her body lays limp. 

The director yells Action and it begins. He towers over her. Her body flails.

The director yells Cut and it stops. He towers over her. Her body lays limp. 

The director yells Action and it begins. He towers over her. Her body flails.

The director yells Cut and it stops. He towers over her. Her body lays limp. 

The director yells Action and it begins. He towers over her. Her body flails.

The director yells Cut and it stops. He towers over her. Her body lays limp. 

The director yells Action and it begins. He towers over her. Her body flails.

The director yells Cut and it stops. He towers over her. Her body lays limp. 

The director says It’s a wrap. She puts her clothes back on and goes home quietly. 

 

At night, when she believes nobody’s watching, the actress cries over her dead fish still floating in the fish tank. She thought about the camera crew, her management team, the writers, the producers, the directors, the other actors. People always talk about speaking up as though it’s obvious. She couldn’t think about herself. She tears her soft white comforter apart. She curls into herself. 

 

Crying Whilst Listening to 90s Cantopop

I take a Hong Kong Film Class thinking
I’ll meet someone like me

Instead, I meet a bunch of gwai lo
who want to fuck Faye Wong. 

               / / 

We watch 2046. Wong Faye plays 
a broken robot train attendant—

Her functions have been exhausted
from overwork and thus, her emotional

expressions are often delayed. 
Still, men love her—or at least, what she represents.

She stares at her reflection in the train window.
Her doe eyes. Imprinted onto my mind.  

               / / 

I sob through every movie that quarter,
even Rumble in the Bronx 

which seems to confuse a classmate
though it doesn’t stop him from hitting on me. 

What disturbs me the most is me
I’m flattered by his inquiry. 

               / / 

I look up reviews for Infernal Affairs
One of them says The Departed is superior,

because despite being a copy, at least it has soul.

               / / 

On Youtube, I watch some Mandarin bitches
stumble their way through Leslie Cheung’s

“Love Of the Past” from A Better Tomorrow
and I seethe with jealousy—My accent is perfect,

according to my mom, but I cannot read so I will never
Cheung K in the way that my ancestors want me to.

               / / 

My favorite Wong Faye song is a Mandarin song. 

It’s called 悶 which means bored or depressed. 
悶 is 心 (heart) with 門 (door) surrounding it.

Depression or boredom is when something,
such as a door, has closed on your heart. 

               / / 

If Mandarin were skin
it’d be the milky white supple expanse
of a maiden’s midriff

Cantonese is more like 
the frizzled plumage of a Silkie chicken 

               / / 

My research says one should sing to speak in Cantonese: 
si ( → ) is poetry
si ( ↗ ) is history (or poop)
si ( → ) is try
si ( ↘ ) is time
si ( ↗ ) is market
si ( → ) is be 

               / / 

Everybody, including myself, forgets
that English is my Second Language.  

“I didn’t learn English until I was five” feels like a lie.

               / / 

My parents said we had Aaron Kwok’s
對你愛不完 on cassette and that I loved dancing to it 
and that I kept dancing until one day I realized 
people could see me and then I stopped.

Listening to 對你愛不完 now, 
it sounds familiar 
though I can’t tell if I’m unearthing a memory or if it’s just my desire to remember
projected onto a pop song that sounds familiar in the way that all pop songs do. 

               / / 

You can save space on Apple devices
by offloading memory. This means

deleting an app’s data whilst keeping
any documents or settings tied to it.

Cantonese has been offloaded from me

The texture of the language is still there
and not much else. 

 

Alison Zheng (she/her)’s writing is published or forthcoming in The Margins (Asian American Writers’ Workshop), Black Warrior Review, Copper Nickel, and more. She is a MFA Candidate and Lawrence Ferlinghetti Fellow at University of San Francisco.

 

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Feverish

At first flush,
I could not tell if it was

a fever or the heat death of the world,
so I confided in you

about my burning
only to learn I was a nuisance,

a worm your ear never craved but
came to nurse

because you pity little things
like a voice that carries

its hurt modestly, that covers up its
shame with its own hands.

But those hands cannot cover what
exceeds them—

this body now put in its place
but teeming with other burnings

that beg your pardon
as much as your attention

(a care that cannot be
learned).

 

Travis Chi Wing Lau (he/him/his) is Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College. His research and teaching focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture, health humanities, and disability studies. Alongside his scholarship, Lau frequently writes for venues of public scholarship like Synapsis: A Journal of Health Humanities, Public Books, Lapham’s Quarterly, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. His poetry has appeared in Wordgathering, Glass, South Carolina Review, Foglifter, and Hypertext, as well as in three chapbooks, The Bone Setter (Damaged Goods Press, 2019), Paring (Finishing Line Press, 2020), and Vagaries (Fork Tine Press, 2022). travisclau.com.

 

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Men

are the sort of people who 
chisel butter from its block
and with a short, blunt knife
pummel it back and forth
across a bready path until 
only its stain is left. It never 
occurs to them to cut off 
a clean square and heat it for 
a moment, that butter melts
simply asking to be poured. 

 

Rita Mookerjee is an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Worcester State University. She is the author of False Offering (JackLeg Press 2023). Her poems can be found in the Baltimore Review, New Orleans Review, the Offing, Poet Lore, and Vassar Review.

 

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On Sitting In A Formal Garden After Explaining To A Curator Why A British Institution Shouldn’t Sell Original Cultural Revolution Posters In Its Gift Shop

Tulip buds in a dense perfect circle 
amist lawn that needs no sprinklers. I think of California’s
layered air, driving past patches of blackened forest,
the smell of burned couches and electric pressure cookers
through our masks — I removed mine to kiss her goodbye.
Pins of rain waken me to this garden, petaled 
flowerpots on pedestals, mothers gliding prams on 
oversized wheels, lanes rounding the lawn. Or are they
buggies or are they pushchairs?  Willows accompany 
two parallel ponds. In a corner beyond my eye, 
the raised bed where my daughter sowed wildflower 
seeds provided by a curly haired park ranger,
tiny hands now patting, now scraping, now massaging, 
now tunneling into soft composted earth. And what of these posters,
some even possibly drawn by my twenty-year-old mother,
glad for any commissioned break from her shift on 
machines spinning cotton. How her fingers curled
as she shaded sleeve to collar, handle to the neck 
of a hammer, the clock ticking as she practiced lips. 
How her breath quickened in the last minutes before
her return to the floor, erasing errant pencil lines. 
And where did the posters live after they were peeled off walls – 
rolled into calendars featuring Teresa Teng every month? 
Folded and tucked between books with covers wrapped 
in newspaper, their titles penciled over newsprint, the posters
biding their time through market reform, knowing they’d be 
wanted again in a London home with vinyl records?
Or perhaps the posters are not originals afterall – a British
gallery cheating British gallery goers, and have nothing
to do with cotton, or Teresa Teng, or my mother. 

 

Rona Luo is a poet and acupuncturist based in London, UK. She currently serves as a mental health consultant for Kundiman, a non-profit dedicated to nurturing Asian American literature. She is working on a hybrid manuscript on her family’s role as Han Chinese colonizers on Hmong land.

 

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