3 poems
by Mimi Yang
Mimi Yang currently resides in Shanghai, but she has lived in Boston and Montreal. Her work has been recognized by the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers, and appears or is forthcoming in The Margins, Palette Poetry, Rust & Moth, and elsewhere.
At the Tea Horse Road
I keep writing about myself when I could instead
write about horses, their eyes gleaming murderous
with joy, their hooves heavy with the meadow
that is shameless & kind to the world but not to me,
not yet. See? I did it again. Most creatures
we make our fantastical objects of love do not love
us, nor do they worry about the gnats in their hair
thirsting for those neat rows of bugle lilies that line
their scalp. Unlike me, they can enter the broken door
of Lijiang’s wheat-laid houses time & time
again, without ever wondering if their fathers were raised
under roofs like these, if these waterlogged planks
of cedar wood ever hid bodies, if they could fit
themselves the bedroom where the bodies were hidden
and believe it a stable. The truth is, I loved the horses
not for the maple of their manes or the bugle lilies
I wished to find, but for the flecks of blood I caught
in their fur, the noseband wounds circled
by gadflies in worship, how I suspect they never forgot
about the carriage they drew or the whip-
kissed lines on their back. But they galloped
into the stream regardless, & never felt the need
to question water for what it’s washed clean.
Every Time I'm On Vacation
all the scenery starts to seem the same. As if
the Tushita karst cave, red with ghosts, opens into
another halfway across the country, or if every
waterfall keels over and dives into China’s
sixty-something bottle-green lakes. In time, even
the severed pink lotus heads sold for 20 per jin
tastes the same from Suzhou to Qingdao. I guess
what this means is I worry there are no more
new doors to worlds I can open and disappear into.
No beauty enough to outlast the summer or excuse
what ruin I will eventually welcome. But then,
on my walk back to the hotel where strangers make
my bed and clean my filth, I remember
the stretch of unpaved road on the bike ride back
from Derek’s house: how every night I noticed
the different ways leaves dip low to lap warmth
from streetlamps—some days, like sisters limned
by light, slow-dancing to Leslie’s fast songs in the living
room—others, like years reluctantly slipping back
into scarred stone. Still, year after year, they practice
this promise to meet, stupid with the simple desire
for return. Here, on this asphalt where I can stay
unseen in ugliness, driving my crooked bike, beauty
is sea-glass small in the vastness of tides. I am
always coming home, all over again.
The Worst Things I've Ever Done
Got a piercing without telling mom. Then went back
to get four more until my ear swelled up, pig
pink & ridge-swallowing. Lied about winning
the math competition—I didn’t even attend it
because I pretended to have an asthma attack
but really just ate bags of fried collards
until I threw up swirls of sap green, algal blooms
floating in toilet water. Cried out of coming
to class, even though I didn’t believe in anything
worth crying for anymore, I just didn’t want
to learn about eutrophication, those windshield-
blue cod sinking into the green of unchecked plant
growth, how sometimes life is suffocating
in its wild abundance. Instead of listening
to the proverbial lie, the one in which young
Da Vinci spent three years drawing eggs in Verrocchio’s
studio until they were perfect, I squeezed red paint
onto the canaries whose likeness I failed
to capture, pressed my hands into the coils
of pigment & made wide circles in the shape
of dying suns, then blamed it on my sister.
The next day, I watched in silence as dad tore her
drawings, all the purple ferns & bold birds
with human eyes, slow like folding blankets. Didn’t
apologize for any of it: not the damage I couldn’t
create perfect eggs out of, or the look on my mother’s face
when I told her where on my arms this damage
ends. Why should I? Even on days where I choose
to consider the lake for every creature it has spared
from death, the stubborn cod parting
through red tide, I still have to watch my sister
pull a hangnail down to her flaking red fingers, then
another, & another, every night before sleep. Always
promising, I’ll stop this time. Always, I swear I didn’t
start because of you. I swear I didn’t watch as you pressed
scaled flesh from the upper bunk forcefully back
into water, coaxed color out of raised lines. I just didn’t
have anything to do with my hands. That’s all.