萬事如故
(translates to “Ten Thousand Things As Before”)
I write love letters
to my chinese –
for she is fragile.
and so I build her pillars to stand on
writing out the names of
my mother, my aunt, my sister.
my uncle, her father, her mother.
the characters stand in file
and they peer back at me.
i think perhaps they might be suspicious
but i hope they don’t mind.
I draw out love poems to my chinese every spring,
and I trace over the words
that my mother tells me
are the ones you’re supposed to say.
I draw them hundreds of times until
their backs are straight,
and each line sounds off echoes
that fly over oceans and back
to tell me stories of where I have been.
I listen rapt but I don’t quite understand
even though i can feel the words hitting me, knocking me
over
with the momentum of ten thousand sounds, ten thou-
sand sights,
ten thousand people and a sea of a language that bore me
up from the sand
she was never actually fragile
she was just waiting for who I’d become
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