Daydreams Are for Counting

The bottleshop at the threshold of town

squats like a teal-painted barn

for if the town was just a prairie,

and at that barn would sit a little lamb

on one of the parking stumps, 

in front of which a car would normally face

and be relieved that, now, it can look nowhere.

The lamb sits with the mufflers still hot

and spectates the fuel stations just to the left

and the tiny daisies 

salvaged as a favor by the crawling spring.  

The uncomfortable summer wind crayons her fleece

with a rush and then a slow morale.

At the bottleshop barn, nothing is made secret.

The snarky, bubble-retro hang signs 

that can take up the width of a door

with just a word.

Beer. Lottery. Soda. Smokes.

because, as everyone knows, 

the best service is being able to tell something 

like you know it for sure.

Little Lamb tips the cream soda can 

towards her cupid’s bow and

picks up the pink kitchen grease 

long melting on her upper lip.

Her tired eyes and the sun.

Little Lamb would be allowed to daydream.

On the dusty freeway ride last week,

she sat with the air in the vehicle dry

with a blank dreariness.

Out the mud-spotted window, 

she catches a glimpse of a burial site,

sprinkled with yellow and pink petals

like fallen letters.

Next to it, a seasonal berry stand.

She comes home on some days and washes her face

with just the warm tap and waits for the scrubby 

redness on her cheekbones to subside.

Little Lamb walked in yesterday to the bagel shop

that, no matter when, is always busy

being filled with goth white people

wearing authentically-faded tees and 

septum piercings clogged with nameless fingerprints.

The nice blonde girl probably with a name 

like Sugar or Candy with the nippling tie-dye tank 

and just the stoned guy named John.

The pre-job and post-job bustle

off-shelving the sandwiches called something cute like

The Tahoe or The Yuba or The Yosemite

with the pungent sprouts.

The bagel shop that sells the bubble tea 

made of colored dust from a pouch,

and amidst all this Little Lamb would think 

Maybe I will fly further.

Maybe she will fly further into this

compaction of idiosyncrasies 

and, like everyone, be a drifter.

Little Lamb after a shift will palm,

kindly with an ask, a fortune cookie

packed with, not one, but three fortunes 

that a machine error pinched in a clump, 

leaving even the blank

paper strips with more wordless ridges.

Little Lamb with Sam Phillip’s How To Dream

in her ear like how it sounds in Gilmore Girls.

From her bed, she can see the black tapestry

of mellow-night trees with the tops like a lacy fringe,

like it was meant for a face.

Across the cool window is a faraway house

with a baby lamp still out on its porch. 

Little Lamb some mornings would want to lay 

with her back on the green 

in a type of nirvanic calm that she tells everyone 

the jade bangle on her wrist makes possible 

when it really is just painted glass.

She would nest her head in the grass until, 

if she waited enough years,

the daisies lined the pockets of her jeans and 

crept up her sleeves and pant legs until 

the daisies are the only things still clinging.

Die in this sunshine.

On signal, she would board the night train.

She elbows her lap, 

cream soda can to chest,

her sight in line with the underbelly of the passing, 

pollen-streaked trucks.

On the side of the road in front of the bottleshop barn,

Little Lamb recalls what it is like to see movement

from a view of one not moving 

but feeling real.

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.

妈 Had This Needle

Perhaps the girl makes due with the time been dealt.

She wears her mother’s old buttoned tee and low-rised jeans. 

Call it nostalgic and have her

be molded by where a body used to be. 

Call it timeless

and have her carve shapeness into where time washed the body out. 

Fill it with something more prepared to be alive. 

The girl fashions a life from when the world seemed conquerable 

to a woman who had not yet been conquered by the world. 

The woman once owned a ragdoll that told her

Make sure you stuff me with a cry.

She tosses the needle up into the sky and 

watches it fracture into more stars.

Jane

The skirt fits you nicely,

so dance in it with more terror.

I dug a trench in the crook in your hips

and grounded it into shards

I gifted you the powder.

I called them bones.

I powdered your cheeks and watched the industrial acid rain.

I hid the gun in your vertebrae.

You were born my girl so 

no need to try to be a child.

Load up your arms

and your legs.

Lend me your helmet for a little while 

and help me

unzip your skull to fill with it a radio cue.

Push forward! Forward!

Let me make myself a camp in it.

Mary Janes that cannot be a home anymore

so it becomes, like us, rest assured, 

the destroyed and the atomized destruction.

The machete.

My dull razor on dirt-laced stubble

and I shave the hatches off of your fake-leather tanks.

So where are you going 

stomping on Gaea’s porch

when I am the one to reinvent her? 

In this girlhood 

with a ground made more for war than play,

I watch you make more bomb craters

and stuff it with a cold pearl and a pair of wings. 

Maybe it was folded into the shrapnel

that ruptured like a lip before it kisses.

You tell me it is a stalemate

and I say I am winless but 

I gifted you the breakage that still rings in my ears.

Ritual on Stockton Boulevard

A ritual begins with the silent confession that it must be done again.

It is to perform a residual duty. 

The peoplehood is a sun.

They herd in the funeral square.

Mid-June. A parking lot sans the isolated thinking.

Metal folding chairs with Chinese characters, 

spray-painted as-a-matter-of-factly

under the seats, 

made only to be read with implied loudness and haste.

Faced down.

Face the plated concrete intensified by the longest daylight.

Their chants embellishment for a gap

like the dew obsessed with a droughted valley.

A voice and then an unchangeable instrument.

An elder blows a carved horn, arched like a scythe,

outs a slow, wobbly groan.

The old men sing with a strenuous, operatic grace,

each sound cut short and sharp with unfinished existing. 

An instrument is now merely a punctuation, so it is a cue.

It is an order, a scale, a timely cymbal clash evoking another groan

and another Canton hum.

These elders are cloaked like lords in 

golden poppy robes and capes

made of fake red silk and scratchy glitter lace

keystone to unapologetic costumery. 

Attopped with a paper crown.

This is by the barricade of Kikoman soy sauce cans

and post-ambushed frozen squid boxes left in the hot sun to sweat

on the unfurbished sidewalks that lead them, if they want to keep going,

past the past-its-prime community centers and 

apartment stacks with the verdigris water hose,

past the donation boxes with miscellaneous open-toe shoes

and, if they’re lucky, a once-adored New Balance,

past the barbed-wire terrain with no more gold to stake 

that is more sand-like than soil,

past more temples, like this one, with the hubs and the clubs with the phrases

“Friendship Association” or “Benevolent Society,”

through this unwalkable part of the city challenged 

by those who have only known walking,

to their clothesline-and-cactus neighborhood 

that has the other kind of a mid-century homes.

It is evidence of time made daringly intimate

and obliquely personal.

By the afternoon, everyone pours the tea.

Set the cash on fire.

Watch the supernova swell in the trash and the wealth hinder

and take our fingerprints with it to become nothing no longer. 

Gone, so it’s better.

Even right.

Gray exhaust lapses the sight of the temple walls,

the virgin-summer sky without signs of any celebration,

or the people who don’t celebrate.

The gutter reels like a scored limb.

Melts into a scabby grimace with buboes,

its paint shell taking on the form of a charred lymph node.

A ritual is a calling of people,

of clerks and waitresses and plumbers,

of low-level state workers and franchise picker-uppers

and newspaper readers and soap opera watchers,

of Macy’s tote bag and Ranch 99 plastic bag collectors 

and insurance agency T-shirt receivers

and second-round money burners. 

They dance with the ash like under long-awaited rain.

Wear the scrappings of diasporic ode. 

A cigarette-lunged squeal 

from the old grandpa whose voice never breaks

and who breathes the energy of paper gold.

They see the lord’s dress khakis and Sketchers peeking under his red cloak.

Glasses stamped onto his lopsided nose 

like a scorched root.

The complexion inflamed with wrinkles.

The rag wrung, grateful.

From his voice a hymn, the passing of linguistic metallica

scraping the long-corroded face.

Breath loud, certain, 

with no more room in this universe to act lost.

Unwaveringly indulged in the scheme of what is to be sung and then sung again.

Together they roam

with light, synchronous feet 

to a rhythm that was rough

like those children dried out with a purpose 

and the burning of our paper wishes.

Here they have, or what is to be called,

the making of a race of humans 

who turn into people.

Another set of hands depleted so they grab onto more sand 

and more onto children,

heads a grudging bow.

Weeping under the sunken canopies with Opium lungs 

and they sleep to a drum

but they were known more 

for the corners of the world misspent.