Countertop Film

We meet a woman with the century in its infancy. 

The sidewalks where people got high from 

the both omnipresent and unsuccumbable hope 

of seeing life as a romance. 

The parking lots torched with the coast’s relentless sunshine

and whatever there was at the time for people talk the gossip 

and drain out the seriousness because, with it,

no one would watch the show.

She giggles. 

Presents a stuffed camera at the Walgreens countertop, 

her skin tan and optimistically dewey.

The first photos. 

The crowd she wanted to be in and the crowd she wanted to watch.

Her eyelids rubbed with a diffused style of eyeshadow 

worn first by Hollywood’s marvelous 

and then by young women who marvel 

at what should comprise a life lived only once. 

A PINK tank top. 

A high ponytail. 

The pieces no one could catch.

The pillowy blue shorts comical enough for her

to feel so undeniably Californian to the point 

where cooling herself in an air-conditioned 

drugstore was enough to entertain the 

mirage of an all-American summer. 

The woman blabbers with convinced majesty about 

these weightless things, like any storyteller would do, 

to write of a lifestyle.

To televise life is to rearrange pathos,

to string fascination to a culture in which we all reside

 and which belongs to nobody, 

at which everyone can exercise spectator gratitude.

And to own this pathos,

is to foremost own the picturesque comfort of 

never thinking too deeply about exactly why it is all beautiful.

Be emotionally separate from the wanting, but want it. 

Have it all.

Play tourist in your suburb. 

Make your own applause.

Leave Huizhou in pictures. 

The watering hole that her older brothers thrown her into

and from which she quenched her thirst.

The peanut barrels from which all the boys and girls

will each pocket half a handful and run run run fast 

because they thought that they, and maybe they did,

took all that anyone could want in this world.

The 1980s Panasonic television.

The first Smurfs episode aired in China.

The first dose of the romantic nothingness

that is comfort and the everythingness that is

knowing the wanting has begun.

But today was new. 

Today she can keep everything.

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妈 Had This Needle