Don’t sleep on the wormup!
Don’t sleep on the wormup!
You’ll never make it out if you try.
On Long Island we saw a dead eel,
silver-blue
Stomach leaking in terror.
It looked like a sausage.
No one ever tells you life is going to be so inspiring.
Run yourself to the creek or miss
the peat fire, big for the rest of your days.
Name oblivion in so few strokes.
I’m waiting to embrace big slabs of water,
salt my skin thick.
Take whatever excuse you can
to leave yourself. I wish I knew better
what the deal “is”
~
Stealing chickens from my mom
I’m stealing chickens from my mom.
It’s not fair for her to keep them in the shed:
tawny, ginger, jump rope, plum cake.
My mom broke wild in the village
as a girl, running her aunts overtime.
She threw a chicken in the water
to see if it would float, fly or swim.
My mom, ugly as she thought, on the blistered bank,
Saw chicken come to sky.
My grandma had no chickens.
Every year she claimed a New Year’s rooster.
Every year the rooster made its escape.
The hunt through the town!
“I’m not crazy!”
Forget everything you’ve just been told.
“It was here. The chicken was just here.”
I never saw a New Year’s rooster in my life.
I stole the chickens from my mom.
In fifty years
I’ll take them to the sea.
We’ll follow port trucks up the coast:
their feathers, bleached by sun,
me, forgetting my own face,
I will never be alone again.
~
Fish Poem
I have been carrying your
dead fish, through and through.
At night I let it rest on my chest,
I touch its ear stones, otoliths.
In the morning I drag it, collared, down the street.
I am not getting paid enough!
to pour water into the mouth of a dead fish.
It weighs nothing
so I think it will be worth it in the end.
Still I am inconsolable at the docks,
with nothing to re-animate,
My fingernails digging
under the flash-smooth scales,
I pry out your stomach,
I put it in my mouth.
~
Porky’s
I have done a lot! Or, a little.
Either way I’m going to Porky’s for dinner.
They bring everyone a pig, one entire pig.
You carve it yourself, snout to tail.
I know my own ligaments. I wear them on the outside.
I want to get so busy I can’t breathe,
Carve the pig, unsheathe the spine,
taste the veins clean.
At the end of the night I walk out
poor and pure.
~
Kathleen Ma is from a northeastern suburb of Beijing.