The Most Beautiful Moment in the World
In the coldest corner of the mountain,
I was naked.
The skin of my feet dry.
I sat in the only washroom
and pierced my eyes into the chapped tile as if
looking for an invisible mist to speak.
My lips broken,
licked over and over.
I made a reel of scintillating mold.
Above, behind me the transparent window pocket
of every terrain’s embedded ledge.
A diary-sized panel of glass.
It was the room that was hungry.
Bottom bare on the toilet seat,
I looked away but looked forever
under the window’s gaze.
I was what the mountain peered into except
I peered further. I peered
into the wall of opacity.
I was the first to feel cold without seeing the snow.
Goosebumps scratched in bubbles on every corner of my limbs.
I toed my feet into the porcelain ground
and stamped harder into the pavement
I chose for a carousel of fighting.
On a ground not moving I know where my feet are.
I jam into the pavement a stamp mark of my own keratin.
Toenail hoofing the suburbanite grid of a tundra.
My standing my only welding glaze.
Under a photo panel
of the coldest corner of the mountain
my eyes never leave my body as they wait
for my feet to puncture.
Walk like you haven’t lost yet, so don’t move.
Self-made parachute in a plummet.
I will save nothing.
When the purge comes,
there will be nothing left for me to save
so I close my eyes to thank you.
Foothill Drive
With the gas tank filled just enough to last the intrastate hopping,
our family presses forward into the night
without much thought about being missed
by what happens in the sunniness.
Baba listens to Mama
and responds as he edges the Honda wheel with his palms
in a way one does
when checking the pulse of a dead thing.
In the dark,
we pass through the dry foothills
with the scraggly grass veils
pruned colorless at every day’s high noon
like the white hair on a corpse’s chin
and held always
in the lateness of every consecutive nighttime
with a rather omniscient presence,
that is for doing nothing that will ever
last permanently.
It is when the desert sun sets.
Honeying a burnt tongue in a wet saliva mouth.
It is when we gloss what has been done
and think
Let it rest for a while.
Is it not deserved?
The family rides in this Odyssey
in the same meandering movement as
everything that is unsure.
There is no setting in the place we are in
and after all these years
I will ask Baba and Mama
What is a destination? and then I will wait.
The patch of a tousled hair
that is the big question between the Sierra Nevada and the Central Valley.
An unprobed scalp.
A feeling removed.
Ponderosa pines stringing
along both sides of the highway,
laid as carefully as angel ribbon,
like the outer strands of an
uncommenced braid
or perhaps a braid picked apart so carefully
and flattened to a fragmented origin
so it is something that can be new.
Composed by first being seen as decomposed
by the people who saw the core before there was fruit.
On the foothills,
on the road in its absences,
we glance at the raised dirt slabs as I imagine
What if there was a giant’s butcher knife that had parted this dirt
and we are just whatever muck that crawled out of it?
I look up like there is something beyond us on a raised stage.
A slice of what holds roots.
On a drive-by where violence doesn’t count as violence,
we crouch there,
wither-intended poppies who marvel the proud footloose
and, if we crouch there for long enough,
maybe soil will begin to fill our socks with a living thing.
On this foothill drive
to Grandfather’s funeral,
my Mama tells about the family
like a narrator and just that.
Those who we somehow don’t talk to much anymore
and those who don’t shut up.
Those who saw the war and those who felt it on bluing flesh.
Those who were the negligible splinters
on the ocean raft who, in a way,
encapsulated the happening.
My thirty-eight-year-old
fucked up Bic-Razor cousin born with the Eureka seal
who is home, now, smoking pot in PoPo’s
bathroom with the wrung adult diapers still dripping
from water in the peony-pattern tub.
He thinks of high school.
A VHS tape paused mid-cascade and pre-avalanche.
He dumps a glass of water over PoPo’s head
and watches the clear liquid break around
her like a closing bulb.
PoPo sits there blinking fast,
not muttering much.
A glass with a hand still closed over it.
One of the aunts. The knife.
The desire to scream Run! Run! Run so I don’t have to.
The family in Little Saigon and the Sacramento home.
The one who saw and the one who threw
and the knife that speared into the off-white wall
and landed in the wood
in a shape of a dead mouth sewn
with smile lines.
The cousin dressed wrongly
in the unerodible nest with no care to give ourselves.
He lights the blunt.
The corpse in the pine tree that fell.
Comfort
You unhook your ribcage from the morning rays,
hoist them on a platter and walk them home.
Edge the mounted globe with your forefingers,
mottled with sunlight more than blood
and struggle with the screen door as you call my name.
You tell me
Do the same for yourself one day.
Show me that you can do it, grow up!
You say I am simply you but a version more rare.
We meet Dad in the kitchen by the chopping board.
He rocks the butcher’s knife like a toy boat,
but he is a lost sailor
kissing each bladed corner into the dampened wood.
A day-dreaming sway.
The father’s hand rocks to balance an unforgiving tide.
You take your ribs, your globe with an interrupted orbit
and set it down in front of him as the family marvels.
The game is truly beautiful.
Dad clutches a bone,
wraps his wide, letterless fingerprints
around its scarlet flesh,
consoles the marble how you do with my veins
when you see a little bit of you running.
He rams it with the sharpened edge thinner than,
you joke,
the film roll from your wedding night.
The ribcage is now pieced
as if a man looked too hard for an opening.
Let them make a meal out of where a heart once grew.
He pries the last chunk off, but the butt of the knife slips
onto a stone-slab made to carry only thuds.
He wipes off the juice,
the same that always comes from things
that can only wish for more orbits.
I take the smaller pieces, his anchors, land them into a bowl.
We grace it with seasoning, or what we can call now, a season.
I massage it because it is your bone.
I assign meat its aging spots.
And now that we’ve dealt with an orbit by breaking it,
we have two options.
We can take it outside again.
Let it nap in the bark vest we borrowed from our tree.
Line the blocks in an array
like we assign how each part of a skeleton rests.
Let the flames make ash under it,
though the meat is not fazed from its rows
when it dies.
Smoke is now what chases a house and waits for it to burn.
Let the smoke chase the house still held by your ligaments.
Let the smoke find a place to stay.
We smoke out an animal like silent hunters,
harness it onto our mantels and tapestries,
into our ears,
out of our mouths.
Or instead,
we choose not to burn.
Rub salt into muscles that don’t realize they’re cold.
Wait for it to dry.
As we wait, the bark still leans against the tree it used to hug,
calling itself useless.
From it its resin,
lost collagen turned ornaments.
When the meat is raw it’s a girl untouched
and when it’s
cured
it becomes yet another uncooked meal for a home.
Maybe we can take the tendons and wear them like jewelry,
then eat what makes us jewel-like.
Leave ourselves alone to age.
Our skin infused by wrinkles, barricades.
Our expressions submerged into each socket
that follows a bone put into place.
Wait for however longer a complexion can hold space,
shrivel up grown-up conversations
about how we all talk like our parents,
roll out our tongues like cadavers
on the American tabletop.
I wait to be served another catastrophe
like the blackening of bark with a desperate family name.
Pacific Moondust
9:12PM.
Keith wipes down the last table.
Barbara clocks out.
You click off the Open sign with the sticky light
and have the bulbs blink themselves to sleep
until they’re asked again to wake and
everything feels as though it bathed in the day’s molasses steam.
The fake lilies still flaunt their manufactured wrinkles
and their plastic stigmas wink.
The moon sinks halfway into the sky.
The lily wants to play pretend
but it will always be a Mother,
happy,
standing in resin that settled ages ago
in yet another vase
born with the wave of them,
another that rose in an en masse Pacific crossing
but, really, alone to be filled with anything.
My podium will never be gone if it glues me here!
The lily is trapped in an empire.
Dust magnet.
You grab a napkin.
How annoying.
You can never get rid of that.
I lock the main doors.
It seems to come with the process of wanting.
I don’t wish to be a trouble either so I make way to the back first.
Watch the street logos still sauntering.
Wait for us to grow closer only how
the minute hand and hour hand grow close.
Give me something beyond the unclingable clinging dust.
I’ll meet you outside, where we parked our vehicle in the background
and we forget how long it had been left in the sun
to melt into a design for a stage,
into a whitewash for an old, unrottable fence
where the white dried soft like how we think people never do.
I press my fingernail into the shapeable skin and coax it with a dent.
I try to dig out the crescent moon that summits me for
an unspendable decade called the fingers on the daughter’s hands.
I try to dig out the unfinished process
and give, finally give,
the once-sapling its girly stickers.
Was it ever right to wax the waned?
Do you think, like us, it remembers a time when it was liquid?
Did it learn from us?
To take on the shape of a dead thing standing?
I run my fingers to test if there is any paint left
brave enough to still be shaped by a grave digger.
We have yet to jump the fence.
We’ve been waiting, the fence sinking.
It’s in the ground and it’s gone and
the moon waxes the yard with another ocean
so we don’t have to wait to jump anymore.
If I cross the ocean with you this time,
would you still be scared
that this raft was made to be a grave
until you said that
it wasn’t something you could afford?
You ask if I want to watch you drive to back before,
just for the hour.
Where A Dreamhouse Should Have Been
*
The man paces until he reaches a village,
his glance following the golden aura of
household oil wicks that gave the cottages
their eyes, and as he arrives in front of the
one with its features more aged than the
rest, he peers into the window. The man sees
a nervous, barely-teenage boy, wide awake
and terrified when the rest of the world does
the same while sleeping. The boy is crying,
but the man knows that there will be more
lost. The man is the one left to convince
manhood to be worth more than what dies.
The boy looks up, lines his gaze with the man
on the other side of the window, who is like a
mirror, but buried under a generation; A man
around whom the night immediately blackens.
A man who wraps himself with it and
runs until he is out of a continent.
*
The man is home alone in his apartment.
More wrinkles on his forehead like a scribbled
map. The room is laced with perpetual dust
and lined with furniture picked from dumpsters
of shopping mall alleys, thrown into the lended
Honda in such a manner that would only
quasi-violate traffic safety guidelines, and rolled
into the unit’s shared parking space with
the Carpenters’ Yesterday Once More still
at its guppy bridge. Neglected on the run-down
floor of the foyer is a backpack that once
carried ghosts on his shoulder. He sits at the
dinner table. A tea kettle with paisley
brushstrokes and three months worth of
paychecks tucked into the beak. A radio turned
on, broadcasting across the frontier from NYC
with the World Trade Center in shambles and
civilian terror engorging on the witchhunt against
terrorism. The man sits and chews with Bush’s
voice in the background. His Nokia chimes, to
which he flicks open as he deposits the remaining
soda crackers from his hand back into the
cardboard sleeve. He yammers into the phone
with his mouth half-empty for every sha la la la.
*
A young woman enters who, six months
later, will be determined a wife, sign a page in
a red Henley top and flared denim at a counter
of an air-freshened room, be called married, pack
back up the film, and clock back in. Share a box
of Empress chicken with a Carpenter’s boy
on the Golden Gate Bridge. Charm the court.
Be restlessly the same but a sharer of a municipal
drawl that is, after all, the monumental point.
Carry first the infant, then a green card, and
gravitate towards the gradual devoid in
exhibitionist severity. But of course, that is never
for a wannabe Yankee girl. And, like a narration,
dinner is set. But the man’s face is twisted tight,
tugging the collar of a remedial-level U.S. Polo Assn.
shirt he won’t replace until, oh let’s say, the
orchestrated final shine of the woah-oh-oh.
He clutches a Tsingtao bottle. He shouts, breaks
its neck on the dinner table so the shards and booze
both look like tears. The table pushes. Another bottle
breaks. Another voice breaks. The fluorescent
lights buzz melodically above the couple to make
a tune from injury, decorating the blankness mercied
by their screams.