Aubade with Invasive Species
All day a tempest of Asian lady beetles. They overtake the town by dark.
In the mirror, I am wishing my name into the sun. I am trying on
different gods : colors broken between fingers.
My mother says my name like a dream, that I should want to smell small and luxurious.
You can tell a ladybug from a lady beetle by the sharpness
of their beaks : the colors broken between their legs.
Do blackholes litter their backsides?
Are they white-berry cheeked and ruptured with baby teeth?
I open a window. The dark overtaking me like a red bodycon dress.
It’s all so religious, the way I was born, the way I will leave.
I must follow the women into the spaces between one stoplight and the next.
I am losing and god, I am down to two, my body and its lack of church.
My mother splits open the side of a bug : little red second of rain.
Little girlish blur of bravery. For her, every dream is about a dressing room.
So I snap the neck of her gospel and stake my life repenting for the velvet moons.
Every Asian lady beetle is more aggressive, more invasive than her Western counterpart.
What makes a god a good fit? Any good daughter pretending she is a good saint.
Any daughter who draws her body out of that dress, revealing the aim of her beak,
the prayerless beads of her eyes, must not be caught questioning
this spectacle of skirtless women, why yes,
when did the country on the horizon materialize all for me?
Animal Crossing Pastoral
Tom Nook takes my teeth as collateral.
Sells me a house by the peach trees.
I poach the neighbors’ peaches.
A fox tells me I have an eye for art.
My eyes bring home counterfeit paintings.
So I furnish my house with wildflowers.
A house of flowers is bad Feng Shui.
Evening blurs my breath with cicadas.
I net the cicadas in evening’s breath.
Thursday, I dream of the good flight.
Thursday, I undrown a bird on the beach.
He promises to send souvenirs from Paris.
Every souvenir secretes sand.
The river memorizes my cry.
The river landscapes my loneliness.
Morning makes more sense in my head.
Morning hands me motions to memorize.
For every seashell not sold, a meteor shower.
For every spoiled turnip, a meteor shower.
The animal neighbors say hush. We cried, too.
The animals smile the future into my skin.
Tom Nook returns my teeth and cowers.
Herbarium
Because I hated what winter, cruel and astonishing,
required of me. In the red snow, I picture white irises
that detonate in my sleep. I don’t actually know what
they sound like; I trust you. For centuries, I exiled myself
to this bed, painted on the walls the flowers plum blossom,
lily, limonium. At night, I stare at the square of a woman
I stole from my father’s wallet. I tuck myself into concrete.
In my dreams, a snowstorm photocopies a field of faces.
Blue and brilliant flashes of light. I pluck off their petals
around the apartment, as if all these adversaries, too,
will explode without me knowing. Springtime and so
I return home to my mother. On the coffee table,
above the streets laced in black ice, she concentrates
on the thousand pieces of a botanical jigsaw puzzle.
It’s incomplete. Algae and wildflowers void of parts
and holding the hot tea she spilled everywhere
between those green bodies. Because hunger stirred
in my stomach, small and violent, begging to be held.
Come on. It wants a name. I wonder if you loved me more
before I had a name. I always loved easier than I let on.
Moonflower
In the blue grass, the one who is worth it all. Somewhere in Ohio, I mistake the field for a sky. I wake to eyes grazed red by wind. This is the closest thing to love: two turtles blinking across parallel lines. This is the closest thing to a promise: your palms. Still and still not swallowed by nightfall. Somebody has braided my hair with lakewater. Sunlight cinches my waist. The coffee grows cold on the veranda, a thousand tiny organisms blossoming in the bitterness. It is mine and mine alone. It is only summer, and possible that I am no longer promised to you.
Sainthoods
Summer and all the spoils of war—red sanctuary and spit and sunbirds dead between my legs. The boy I never saw again said I have doomed myself always searching for something to sabotage what I love. All the blood drained from the spider lily before the first breath. Petals the color of teeth crushed into earth the color of tar. Pressed inside a Muji notebook by my mother whose father only knew how to rhyme my name with Gethsemani, for the Catholic religion he converted half our family into.
*
At night, I set fire to the last true city in a country that clogs my memory, to follow the birds trading one burning tree for the next. Two truths and a lie—I am sometimes a girl; sometimes a saint; a woman on the 42nd Street platform who tries to speak and washes down the tracks. The women who look like her giving birth to dung beetles, each the size of a sun. Two backlit streets forked at the tail end of my spine. Every vertebra sold cheap each week as sour candy. Thirty-three shards of stained glass. The man from the subway tries to twist them back in, every Sunday.
*
Every cell in my body replaced by rain. I watch TikToks of white girls sharpening the shape of their eyes. I fill my Pinterest board with barbed lashes and bad eyeliner. Ferns sprout from my fingertips when I hit ten hours of screen time, eyeballs embedded in nails. I consider the wayward scar of land from my apartment window, the blue curtains within the blue house, dirty laundry flung on the grass. The speck of my father dragging his feet back home.
*
Girl only eats spoiled fruit. She boards a carousel of jade horses. They die every fourth rotation, shudder back to life on seven. Midnight and everything tastes like broken glass. The moon is a grape peeled and peeled until translucent. Girl is most afraid of misjudging the distance between herself and someone else. She whittles down the horses, down to the bone, down to smooth green skulls. They bleed the color of plum blossoms. The reporters will call it acid rains and extreme weather. The horses spin so fast they become a halo cinching the earth.
*
At Starbucks, a woman comes in everyday and asks for a grilled cheese sandwich. She says it’s the only thing her son, in the hospital down the street, will eat. John gets a tall Signature coffee with two pinks. I call a cab for a woman who doesn’t remember her own name. I only got yelled at twice on Saturday. After I quit, we watch Lady Bird and that’s when I never want to watch an American coming-of-age movie again. When I come to see you in the summer, we watch another one. In the movie, our bodies are two thin mints exchanging flesh.
*
My father tells me of a Chinese afterlife flashing with lilies like teeth, the tide spilled rancid and
flaunting its drowned. I believed him. Could I help it? My whole life, everything that glowed was gone by morning. There’s something to be said for how every soul on the planet weeps the same color once you turn the lights off. When they bury you in a field where flowers overlap for centuries, corpse washed clean by chlorophyll, I will wear snakes around my ankles like garden hoses. I will imagine fireflies lining the future where I wake up in a world without my mother. A scene horrible enough to hold, the lake dark and bruising with bodies. Don’t you hear it. Dusk and more rain than rot, us shimmying ourselves from the earth, bright and boneless, miraculous and so very good.