I thought I was cool
Walking to Equinox Soho
In my Canada Goose
At 0 degrees in the Manhattan Winter
Only for my panache to crumple instantly
As a pleasant cigarette smoke wafted into my nose
From a nameless dark man
In a thrifted French beret
And cheap leather jacket
Eclipsing me like I was nothing
As he read Poe out of a hardback
Draped on the ground
Over the nondescript metal stairs
Between John Fluevog and Prince Street Pizza
Effortless
Maybe here he had found the meaning of life
And the Equinox was fucking closed
Reverberations:
Waves flooding a hollow trunk
floating in a rice field. 1
The husk splits,
roots finally spreading
into soil I’ve been taught to reject,
for it was, after all, beneath me.
How hard it is
to support yourself
with both feet off the ground.
I am bamboo now-
hungry for growth,
nourished by the music
of both earths
that claimed I didn’t belong.
Eyes open
to the melody I’d always been:
not broken, not foreign—
the indigenous harmony
of in-between.
Author’s note: This poem alludes to the shame I felt of being an outsider, Chinese, growing up in a predominantly white community, and my recent coming to terms with and becoming proud of being Chinese.
A reference to Jay Chou’s 稻香 that I had been listening to ↩︎
The zombie wakes
Begrudgingly leaving its bed
Bindings falling away
Dirt seeping from his eyes
As he recaptures the art
Of setting one bony foot after the other
Stumbling past the doorway with a groan
Down into the catacombs
Where lies his Treasure
The Elixir in the Holy Grail
His bare minimum consciousness
Delivers him to unto the sealed shelf
And he rips open the jail of his Ambrosia
A juxtaposition against the tenderness
With which he cradles the Vessel of Life
And brings it to his lustful lips
That craving
And finally I awaken
To that first drop of vanilla Colombian cold brew on my tongue