I filled my pockets up with words but they deceived
me—they found a hole, they shimmied out, they
scampered through—left me wondering

why can’t I say what I feel for—? if we were closer
we would lavender, or even after we could knuckle
bones raw—but instead here we are cutting ribbons

from the sky, skinning time purple & bare,
cursing the gods of iridescence as they smoke
hookah into our lungs, burn incense into our spines.

Look You don’t have to be so blown open
about it Level stare we’re just cavities Sorry
and pliant limbs around the languid. Take one
slow lean and suddenly everything seems
applicable. Mouths with their warm red weight. How
last summer, a storm drove me porous River thinned
What to do with all this inner? The bloated oak
the cedar, the bees Curl of fern-shy murmur
peeled up the live side in me

a month after I met Bug, I asked:
“did I tell you I hated people too soon?
were you scared?” he laughed. “please,
it was time. I was relieved.” relieved
like oh good, she’s one of us. relieved
like he didn’t have to hide anymore. and
we don’t, of course, we don’t hate. we just
know. how to see invisible things, how to
not be aggressively abnormal, even when
we are, how to find others like us. we wait
in hiding, and reveal ourselves by careful
codewords. I don’t mind when people smile
for pictures and I don’t mind when they
talk more than they listen and I don’t mind
when they let other people shrink. but
Bug and I, we know: sometimes, you need
someone else to not mind with.

Ruin me in blue,
paint me in skins baked raw
and glass found broken.
I pray to my rock god
with my back bent over,
for arches and rivers
and taut throats cut
with slag. We are not lost,
not creature keepers bound
in curving leather,
stilts sunk deep in dry run mud.
No, we are not them.
We run like skies
swinging sharp and worlds
reflected in ponds—
the taste of heat
on lost tongues.
We live like torn skin
and the scent of blind men,
we rejoice like fire and
love like thumb-stuck barbs
and burial grounds.

This is an attempt to organize the purported divine, foundation
myth of a fugue state. Small boys dissecting birds at the joint—finding uses
for the acute, uses for the obtuse. Our Histories tell us augurs were the first
actuaries—knew how risk burned in the gut. Men who read
the appendix. One lunar year, circling Euclid, I lit
a taper and slipped singed lines
under my tongue. Felt the thin lick of idea eclipsed
by its own urge. Flawed axiom: grasp. Flawed
axiom: rigor. Sum it up knees locked
to a list and broken into step, echo little bittern

Shiver tip, paint me a portrait
for loss, for the color orange
the summer I was sixteen,
and for held hands
like your mother’s china.
Teach me remembrance,
and the hollows of your neck
when you were fourteen
and I thought yes was the greatest
one syllable I had ever heard.
Dedicate my seventeenth birthday
to your parted lips, to gravel
and perfume and to smoke
rolling off cars and clothes.
I told you I loved your elbows
and it was true; you forgot
my last name and left town.

“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves…”

“A person susceptible to ‘wanderlust’ is not so much addicted to movement
as committed to transformation.” 

—Pico Iyer

 ***

There is something spiritual about Key West, Florida. When you walk out of the tiny, raisin-shriveled airport, the sunlight will brand you: brilliant, pulsating, yellow. Taxis crawl around the tropical island in abundance, like industrious ants, carrying crumbs or tourists double their weight. The ocean is everywhere. The blue, the green, the spray, the kiss.

Bungalows line the narrow streets with vines running up white picket fences, or low iron gates. Seafood shacks & tourist traps have their doors burst wide open, honey on their spiky lips, dionaea muscipula. At night, the music is loud on Duval Street, & the ocean shush-hushes—but more out of habit than judgment. It’s hard not to get drunk on a smoky-sweet paradise.

Artists & cats, writers & roosters haunt the streets. They all have something to prove, & yet they aren’t in a hurry to do so; Key West is a place of eternity, after all.

Like a runaway blackbird that has fallen from the sky, here you will feel migrated, displaced, lost in some wonderful way.

***

Over winter break, I had the privilege of attending the Key West Literary Seminar & workshop, on a scholarship. I rubbed elbows with my literary heroes—Pico Iyer, Rosalind Brackenbury, Judy Bloom. I wrestled my literary demons (like how the hell do people get published these days? how do you make your voice be heard? do I have something important to say? & do I have the time to say it?) I wrote reams of poetry & short stories, inspired by the fierce, close-knit writer’s community around me. On my visit to Ernest Hemmingway’s house, I ruminated on his machismo & rather sad life; to assuage my melancholy, I befriended the polydactyl cats that now sleep on his bed. While wandering the neighborhood, I stumbled upon a quirky-organic, hole-in-the-wall café, & had the best breakfast burrito of my life (it had kimchi & guacamole in it—you do the math). I met a handful of inspiring young poets, novelists & reporters, flirted with the idea of a career as a writer. (Or maybe I just flirted.)

When you travel, you play at adulthood—that amusing, terrifying game. But all that sunlight living in the midst of winter begged the question: am I winning or losing? am I courage or coward? am I decisive & forward motion—or faint & giddy wanderlust?

What we know of January, its whole erotics
of cold Flawed body covetous pulse lowing under
mud flats slipped deep as reed knees. How after a certain age
thrill is no accident of vasculature Slim willow lash
the blood pooled under a blush Nerves sure
in the mood to be relieved. The best advice ever seeped was be warm. Careen
a falcon’s sinusoidal path across the afternoon Be the transcript
of a fever dream. Vex the blur-god lowering its cloven
faces Stand beveled humble in entry

On Romantic poets: “I think they used study as a contrast to poetry. The mind cannot always live in a ‘divine ether.’ The lark cannot always sing at heaven’s gate. There must exist a place to spring from—a refuge from the heights, an anchorage of thought. Study gives that anchorage: study ties you down; and it is the occasional wilful release from this voluntary bond that gives the soul its occasional overpowering sense of lyric freedom and effort. Study is the resting place—poetry, the adventure.” –Wallace Stevens, June 20, 1899

I used to think extensively about the question of scholarship against personal creativity (usually prompted by older relatives who, when hearing I am an English major, inevitably invoked now what are you going to do with that). It seemed there were two distinct answers, perpendicular at best, perhaps not even on the same plane — that is, I could either interpret art or make it. I vacillated between the two sides of a text: I want to write it; no, I should read it, I can tease it apart like corn silks; but why would I pull it apart?

I have these two selves. One is happy researching, reading, combing over someone else’s work all day; the other, beautiful as the person’s work is, becomes distracted at every paragraph break by newer and self-made ideas. Some of me needs to study and some to be studied. Is that an ego battle? Somehow poetry seems the opposite of that, but I can see where the perception comes from. It’s not me; it’s my insides. I am everything but most often I can’t see how.

As I work on a critical thesis alongside my own creative work, I see naves scraping themselves places in corners I had never seen. My notebook is half others and half me, and what I want to make is something in between. I pore and pour alternately, each informing the other, the sides flipping and curling like fortunes on my opening hands.

In his essay Why Bother?, writer Jonathan Franzen questions our reasons for continuing to read and write in this age of technological distractions. Amidst his disillusionment, Franzen interviews psychologist Shirley Bryce Heath on the nature of formative reading. Heath uncovers a model of reader dubbed the “social isolate” – children who “take [the] sense of being different into an imaginary world”, and form their most important dialogues “with the authors of the books they read”. These readers are much more likely to become writers as adults, as Heath describes to Franzen, “You are a socially isolated individual who desperately wants to communicate with a substantive imaginary world.” Upon those “unpoetic polysyllables”, Franzen’s exhilaration of merely being recognized was his “confirmation of that descriptions truth”. That sense of identification, acceptance, and belonging had “revealed themselves, suddenly, as reasons to write.”
I grew up with that same sense of deep and nagging love towards the written word. But as Franzen wrote, being a “social isolate” reader doesn’t “doom you to bad breath and poor party skills as an adult…… It’s just that at some point you’ll begin to feel a gnawing, almost remorseful need to be alone and do some reading — to reconnect to that community.” For a long time, reading was my way to escape a world that seemed too confusing and precarious to comprehend. As a child, I also took to narrating my own life like the plot of a novel, tinkering with voice and character and pacing. I don’t remember a time where there weren’t voices in my head, stringing frantic thoughts into narrative coherence. Academic culture back home in Hong Kong pushed us towards hard sciences and math, or at least more tangible branches of humanities, like law and history. But all I ever really wanted was to read, write, and create. As I grew older, I continued to read voraciously, but my ditties and story telling diminished under self consciousness and the monotony of academic writing.

Now, I write grasping for logic and reason but end up indecisive and verbose. My first drafts tend to meander without systematic cause or consequence, I explore without coming to conclusions. It’s because I write not to explain to others, but to explain to myself – to dig my way out of the avalanche of information, facts, quotes, song lyrics, jokes, studies, and headlines that we are bombarded with every day. And how to make sense of it all? I write first and form half hearted arguments later, like sifting through wreckage for one solid idea.

Regardless of how hard I try, my writing (no matter how stoic, scientific, or academic) also always gravitates towards the personal. Rudimentary philosophy taught me to “question everything”, and my one and only belief is to think deeply and write incisively about all that affects us, no matter how banal. So I end up talking about Glee and Gabriel Garcia Marquez with equal gravitas. I think a lot about oppression, about feminism, about television, about art. I write about pop culture and internet culture and the state of human rights in China. It seems only natural to me that this is all inherently related – an interdisciplinary web of personal passions, a series of small revolutions that have impacted me in one way or another.

Writing about things that I care about, however, can make it harder to improve and polish. It’s difficult for me to synthesize objective critique as only about my writing, rather than about my causes, or my passions, or even about me. My English teacher in high school taught us to divorce ourselves from the piece of work. “It’s out there now,” she said, “It exists beyond you as a writer, and they’re just words on a page.” But when I write about real events and real people I idolize, it gets a touch too tangible for me to fully let go. Still, I’d rather face those obstacles than fall into the trap of apathy and indifference.

The writers I hate are those who are bored and are boring. It’s a boredom that seeps through from every syllable – sometimes as dull monotony, and more oftentimes as incomprehensible trifle. I know that quality and value, especially in terms of personal interest, are incredibly subjective. But if there’s one thing that reading taught me, it’s that anything can be fascinating when written about well enough. Two of my favorite books, The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon, are about baseball and graphic novels, and I’ve never even had a remote interest in either of them. But the passion and dedication of the authors came through their prose – drawn from investments in both childhood knowledge and encyclopedic research, cemented in fictional stories about the very real experience of existence.

So while I didn’t identify with the short-stop’s athletic rigor, or the economic hardships of a comic book artist living in New York in the 70s, I identified with their love for something so particular. As Chad Harbach wrote, it’s our love for “an apparently pointless affair, undertaken … to communicate something true or even crucial about The Human Condition. The Human Condition being, basically, that we’re alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not.” Although the process may be painstaking and difficult, reading and writing fill me with sense of recognition, validation, and clarity like no other. And it’s this communal sense of creation, of discovery, of unearthing new ways to manipulate a common language, that strikes me the most deeply as reasons to bother.