This document appears to be a collection of poems and short stories by the author. The first poem is about an interaction at a Chinese restaurant where the author was accused of not leaving a good tip. Another poem describes childhood memories of breaking his leg while biking and the medical treatment that followed. A third poem reflects on the untrustworthiness of memory and how childhood recollections may not match reality.

1. Visitors, this way
Trotter LaRoe
2011-12 Senior Creative Honors Project

2. I owe an immense debt of gratitude to Suzanne Matson.
Her guidance has been and continues to be invaluable.
I also thank my family and friends for their support.

3. Table of Contents
(Little) Letters 1!
Was I Ever in the Woods? 2!
On the Untrustworthiness of Memory 3!
Prologue to a Muddled Boy’s Biography 5!
Nina 6!
Games We Used to Play in Winter 7!
A Blank Night 8!
St. Patrick’s Day in Baltimore 9!
Bowling at Magic Strike Alley 10!
Transition 11!
Locker Room, HPMS 12!
What best describes you? 13!
Causes 14!
Return Home 15!
Ars Poetica 16!
Holy Cow 17!
A Week Outside 18!
Rwanda, a Tourist and a Local 19!
Along the River between Rwanda and Tanzania 20!
Highland Park Pastoral 21!
Isabella 22!
Propaganda, a Western Bar in Beijing 23!
A Beijing Thunderstorm 24!
Erhai Hu 25!
All the World Loves Penguins 26!
On Hope 27!
Lake 28!
Crocus Purple 29!
Traces 30!
Witching Hour 31!
Alligator Poem 32!
Past Midnight in the Hospital 33!
The Every Day Kind of Miracle 34!
Sonnet from a (laowai) 35!
Boardwalk in Shanghai 36!

4. 1!
!
(Little) Letters
Dear Reader,
At a Chinese restaurant in Boston, I was accused of a bad tip,
a mere five percent. The server, veiny, brittle-sized but forceful,
punctured the air with the few dollars in his hands,
loud, hunched.
I scoured pockets, my wallet, the cash
he counted – less than I had put in – and lifted napkins off the tablecloth.
The money vanished, a child or a magician would say.
The money found a pocket.
I fumbled with words, I’m not lying,
then pointed without direction
as if the answer were somewhere else.
Dear friend from childhood,
Even though I’m home,
I won’t approach you for weeks,
still discombobulated from the return,
dusting off old school directories.
I’ll notice your adult distinction,
and maybe you’ll say I grew into
my forehead, and my cheekbones
shifted. We don’t live on the same street.
Your pup named Saturn vanished with cancer.
Both of us still have not found romance:
whatever that is, we had said when we were younger.
Dear great grandfather,
I don’t remember you but I’m told
you were egg-head bald,
eating salsa despite the sweat forming
atop your shiny, bare head.
If this is true,
then I’ll be bald like you,
dabbing the droplets from my head,
hot pepper noodles twining my fork’s tongues.
Dear whomever,
Sometime ago we met, in passing.
We didn’t smile, or even
look. Rather, our bodies clicked
like a door prodded shut
in the breeze. And on we went.

5. 2!
!
Was I Ever in the Woods?
The sprite is not a little girl with wings,
nor a nymph hugging the trees as she climbs,
pressing green thumbs to bark.
The sprite’s hair is made of spiders’ webs
and dried unguents left by nameless bugs.
Her heart grinds, one half against the other,
chugging with the crickets under leaves.
To her, we block the sun, we’re heavy fumes
and oils –
we aren’t mystical.
We would feel disappointed, I think,
to hear her declaim against us this way,
that we are no more a mystery to her than fire
wrought from flint and clash.

6. 3!
!
On the Untrustworthiness of Memory
I remember my leg.
Biking on the highway street in my leather jacket,
my mission calling for the hat with earflaps and aviator goggles.
A routine half-turn.
On the ground
I screamed; I hollered; I tried to crack
the pain apart in the spokes.
Through sobs, breathing became burdensome.
My character died.
But my brother became Hercules,
carrying me home in his baseball arms.
For some time I was enshrined in the couch. The attention salved me.
I was happy I broke.
The doctor whose face was blandness and shadow
put up the X-rays – this is the break. I squinted
so earnestly that the fissure appeared.
He promised my leg would grow bigger, sturdier, unevenly.
The first treatment, a splint,
squeezed the suffering so tightly into my foot
I learned that some pain is loud enough to stave off sleep.
Everything was despair:
the bed, my leg against my father’s,
the pills, bigger than my eyes,
gleaming in the lamplight haze.
When the cast came the pressing left.
The wet paper mache clung to my thigh and calf,
hardening into a purple exoskeleton.
I know this happened because of the details:
perfunctory signatures written in sharpie; the trash bag
I wore to shower; the whiff of sweat and sour;
the tiny saw percussively cutting through the shell;
that my leg, afterward, folded up like a French crane in repose;
the hairs steamed flat.
I’m told I’ve made it up.
When fishing by a creek,
my brother cast the line

7. 4!
!
and caught my brow.
Startled, I could only register
a fragment of the sting,
until he pulled
the befeathered, befuzzed hook
out the barbed way.
Then his sweaty shirt, staunching my face.
When they say I remember it wrong,
that I dreamt it all,
my finger touches a scar,
the slim, hairless crescent in my eyebrow.

8. 5!
!
Prologue to a Muddled Boy’s Biography
If shame were a fence
mine would be ominous, looming,
saying
Don’t you dare.
Really, though,
I’m just stopping myself,
the way muscles become rigid
after overreaching.
That time I rubbed her feet, spoke about nothing,
wondering why I wouldn’t advance any further.
(If the car will let you merge, merge!)
The wind blows, and things
like trees and presumptuous shrubs
waver about.
The fence, though, remains
fixed as ever,
digging itself into that ground.

9. 6!
!
Nina
My brother and I saw it as just a bowl.
Though a bowl,
glossy orange, fiesta bright,
luminescent porcelain – we were enamored!
Because mother stowed it so high, because she said not to touch it
at all,
because we were boys and, because,
really, we didn’t need too much a reason, just the climb,
we clambered for it
up to the Mount Unreachable of the Kitchen Cabinet.
We fumbled with it, my brother who was lankier than I
crouching on the counter, excavating the precious thing,
hands dwarfed by immensity.
Just then she caught us,
amidst, exposed,
while the bowl hovered
where his burdened arms held
and mine reached.
It fell – shattered, glinted into a million,
billion shards. Under the glaze was chalky white.
Mother, like a cartoon,
distorted her face – ouch! – as if she stubbed her toe.
My brother went still as bricks; I
laughed, but not in delight.
She said, “It was Nina’s bowl!”
scooping up the pieces,
brushing so our bare feet
wouldn’t be ripped.
What were we doing anyway,
she wanted to know,
with Nina’s bowl.
All she had left of Nina was that bowl –

10. 7!
!
Games We Used to Play in Winter
The pack of us leapt
hot tub to pool
and back again.
We felt the jets spuming
across our dissembling bodies,
the chicken-pecking tickles of fire on ice.
I’d bring Stretch out – my action-hero buddy,
whose syrupy arms squished under my thumb,
stretching past a falcon’s wingspan.
Then I accidentally pulled him dead,
the viscous elasticity of his limbs
trailing into effervescent waters.
I dangled the loss in front of my parent’s eyes,
pinching the deflated arms,
thumbing the worn face, his missing expression.
I never found another Stretch.
So I swam instead with only people, and, because I had to,
I got used to the world of ordinary things and limited arms.

11. 8!
!
A Blank Night
There was merely the dark, the insipid television,
the bronze monkey lamp I had no history with,
and the vagueness of an ought I thought I ought to have.

12. 9!
!
St. Patrick’s Day in Baltimore
On Eislen Street, the girl’s sneakers pop pink against the sidewalk,
as she holds her mother’s hand.
They are the loveliest people the stoop-sitter has seen this day.
Shouts echo from the Blackout Bar.
The mother’s green hat does not diminish down the street as quickly as
her daughter’s pink squiggles away.
Green shirts wash over the block. Beads commemorating Irish something or other
catch the light, along with clover-tinted glasses.
The white cherry trees have been plucked, revered,
and left alone to their sidewalk plot.
The grasses have been green.
Shamrocks have been plastered to walls, arms, bellies,
breasts, a cheek, a kid’s nose, until the world
is clover, clover, clover.
The next morning, plastic cups skid across the dead street.
A few cars whistle along, packed with children beribboned for church.
One woman has treated herself with an egg tart,
holding her plate in one hand, a fork in the other,
watching the shadows play across the sidewalk.
Briefly, she contemplates her isolation,
as she does every morning,
its tendency to block the sun.

13. 10!
!
Bowling at Magic Strike Alley
The fifth of the fifth-graders stands, spins
his heavy ball of sorrow down the track;
his is dark, obsidian, lurching toward the gutter.
The other four share two balls, one violet, one green.
His foot oversteps the line.
His foot surprises him.
His friend, who wears expensive clothes,
who’s rumored to be a kid model,
checks out the nails of the girl sitting next to him, who
maybe in a week will be his girlfriend.
The other pair pushes at each other similarly.
No one really sees the boy
who chucked the greasy ball down the alley,
landing the gutter as, perhaps, expected.
Unexpectedly, he sings, loudly,
from the front seat on the drive home.
I’m so alive.
Don’t you like that song, he asks,
turning to the green and violet pairs
snickering in the back.
This boy is dropped first.
He gestures with his back to the car,
waving only to the mom while
loneliness sends him tottering to the door.
The fifth of the fifth-graders does not know
what to say when his own mother asks how bowling went.

14. 11!
!
Transition
A friend once told me
depression is a fugue of dullness.
I doubt I’ve known true depression. But, for a while,
I wanted to sleep away greetings, explanations.
And did I say greetings?
Shirt collars bit into my neck.
Clothes too tight and too chromatic
slung over chairs like fatigue.
I spilled more and more
into the softness of sleep.
The wall encroached
where my hand pressed against the turquoise.
A cat befriended me.
Sloppily I ruffled its black fur;
he clawed my hands in feral response.
After winter I hatched anew,
so when I did sleep,
I thought of what was next.
The scars on my hand –
misshapen, instinctive swipes –
were by now delightful.

15. 12!
!
Locker Room, HPMS
Behind the knee he hit me. I buckled
to the hard ground, sharpness
biting at my palms and knees.
Beneath my grey wool shorts the skin braised pink.
The lucky ones strolled by as if there were a breeze
at their backs.
Now I can imagine their thoughts:
That fatty deserved it. Someone had to go.
Perhaps in the Texas heat, they couldn’t see me,
thinking only of how to stay cool,
wanting only to get to the showers,
to weasel through it all.
I walked in late, past lockers vindictively streaked
with pine-scented deodorant flayed at the ridges like cheese.
Everywhere shame, everywhere the reflexes of boys
around those other boys who wanted
to consider themselves men.

16. 13!
!
What best describes you?
Not the paper on my desk, weighted by a tin of mints,
scrawled over with my words,
as if I took a mirror and extracted organs from my opened chest,
and with the tweezers wrote.
Certainly not the photograph,
my family in Miami, my hand clasping a dirty napkin
while the other members toast their margaritas
to vacations, to love, to perpetuity
(and the waiter laughs as he clicks).
The hour before, I had cursed my family to hell,
which the photograph forgets,
because they made me feel like a gutted fish
upside down and hanging.
Neither of these will do –
Perhaps the hairs my dog leaves around the couch,
within the fringes of the rug, and, perplexingly,
on the countertop. Just that, a tiny root of hair,
the end with the follicle still attached –
would this stand in for the dog’s soul,
from the glassy blonde, to the brown, to the bulb at its linear end?

17. 14!
!
Causes
where did grass learn up
not sideways not stunted
but “start yourself”
matter from matter
from lightning
is still matter
gravel crunches under foot
like snow powder soughs
like leaves crinkle
I crave reasons:
the emptiness between stars
the music only dogs can hear
and the smoke rising from an island –
“we’re here, we yet live, we are no driftwood”

18. 15!
!
Return Home
I only despaired a few times while away.
Silence is good, I say.
Words, jumping like crickets
at the sound of a foot, the quiver of grass.

19. 16!
!
Ars Poetica
I.
When I lived in Texas as a child, my metaphor might have been football,
three fingers sinking into sweaty mud.
I leaned upon my pig hoof,
I set tracks.
Then conflict of pad on pad, clapping rushes as I bit hard
into the bright orange mouth-piece.
I detected a bitter herb somewhere in the mix of it all.
Dirty ‘tato skins, grit in teeth.
II.
Without people to inhabit them
the lines read like
instruction manuals –
use the wrench on the three sockets.
III.
Where’s my Freudian love-seat, my Moroccan hand-sewn hemp sweater,
my box of hexes and curses?
I’ll lie down and explain it all,
my hands and my words
in the air,
shaping whatever you’ll transcribe.

20. 17!
!
Holy Cow
Impassioned, some cow scales the slope
next to my overturned, side-ways tree. The one I’m sitting on.
Much too close to me.
Her bell clinks. Her tail slugs at flies
(my hand does the same).
To consecrate the place, I’ve been singing a tune,
some melody of the soul like that chapped buzz
the beetles make, the ones the size of river stones,
the color of faded moss
(they have a name somewhere, but
not in my toothy English).
She slips, it seems, spilling dirt under her hooves,
and on my sideways tree
I halt the song and shrink away
(where my feet dangle and I feel gravity tug).
Oh I pray she won’t fall this way.
To die by cow, I’d have to feel some shame.
I wonder why I sang in the first place,
why she veered here syncopating
that clangy bell with me.
But she catches herself,
moos in relief,
and leaves again.

21. 18!
!
A Week Outside
The sun’s migrant face,
strange, indiscernible,
dips below the trees.
The watchers used to think it was going to sleep.
Now, they ignore it as mere light bulb
ceaseless in its toils;
no one thanks it, not anymore.
The people sitting outside
settle further back into their chairs.
They’ve found routine
shifting with day and night,
between tent and fire.
They turn their music up
and wait through dusk.
When the moon arrives,
delicate like a melancholy youth,
the observers cannot say whether it is waxing or waning.

22. 19!
!
Rwanda, a Tourist and a Local
I have spots where they bite me:
this tender red splotch, these series of bumps.
I’m drawn to them,
to the tropical red bitten into my arms.
In Africa you should understand – the marriage of beauty with pain
is the marriage of God and the sun –
smoldering rays, wind emblazoned coals,
infant green grass over the ferrous earth.
Hills and hills and hills
and the places where corpses used to be,
but now only trees
and memories standing like abandoned homes.
On every exposed part
the bumps, the bites – the harpies never quiet!
This place holds torment,
buzzing, stinging, cruel
torment.
We dig up the bananas,
ferment the juice into urwagwa as our parents did before the plane was shot down.
We harvest the sorghum, carry cassava on our backs,
tolerate another meal of bananas.
We take up our machetes again,
as we had when they were never anything
but tools of cultivation,
washed clean, scratched over.
We endure the grunts trees make when hacked through,
the whoosh of a blade made devil.

23. 20!
!
Along the River between Rwanda and Tanzania
Here, they were lobbed in like waste,
some alive, some dead.
They washed ashore in Congo.
Anyone could fall, skating this edge; any body could collapse
like dead brush into the foam; I could be that muddy water!
The cut cliffs, the hawk perched on the tree overhanging the rocks,
the bridge painted red like the churning water,
the monkey born after the last corpse was retrieved –
one powerful quake, one deep tremor, one warbled sound
of alarm and murder could crumble everything.

24. 21!
!
Highland Park Pastoral
Look! On the lawn a magnolia bends its
arms to the ground, hooks branch tips
in the path of two flirting birds.
The blue jay swirls between blossoms
spilling to the ground by the petal. The cardinal struts
its crowned head and in a glimpse
has flown beyond the sight of the tree.
Smell the flowers, the browning petals.
In the stillness, sweetness sinks in decay.
Now go inside and rest in the drape-drawn shade,
in the pungent bacon odor, and a domesticated
dog’s yapping.
This is an American morning, if,
and this is the clincher – the crucial clause –
(the breeze to scatter all the petals!)
if you’re considered
among the lucky.

25. 22!
!
Isabella
Before I came, I had lamented the formula:
springtime service, a soup kitchen, a three hour chunk.
Volunteers clung to the kitchen area,
grasping at loose knives, tossing ketchup packets,
burning exposed arms against the violent lips of the oven.
We flipped eggs, mindful of the yolks; olive oil sizzled on the grill,
smudging against plastic gloves,
marking our jeans where the aprons fell short.
Isabella lay in wait at the table
where mostly men reclined and watched,
triple-layered, oversized in their Catholic Charity clothes.
She remembered me, she said, shaking hands,
from a year ago, when you kids sang.
I sensed she pitied me,
seeing me sit atop the high school, watching the boundary,
casting a face to the side while we spoke.
Meanwhile, I thought to myself how progressive I was:
our skin touched!

26. 23!
!
Propaganda, a Western Bar in Beijing
Smoke nips at the air,
curling and fussing whenever the door
opens to the frozen Beijing winds.
Sharp arms angle atop tables like thorns,
arcing cigarettes that flare orange and ashy.
This late only the rebels and the bad kids
skulk around the bar.
And the foreigners, of course.
The patrons break English apart, hollering primary school nouns
like student, city, drinks.
The most precise language is chalked on the board
listing cocktails by their English name,
the Chinese in translation.
A scotch on the rocks,
vodka and lemon,
but no Sex on the Beach,
too salacious, maybe, for their tastes.
The foreigners pay half-price for their drinks,
yet many times a national will buy us a round,
motioning everyone to gulp them down.
I’m always asked if I came here for a girlfriend.
The man in front of me puffs smoke in my face,
smoke I will carry away in my skin,
and croons forward with a clownish smile.
He asks the question.
I wave my arms,
No, no, no –
that’s no reason to leave home.

27. 24!
!
A Beijing Thunderstorm
I had been so sticky hot that I needed to learn
the word describing humid –
clingy heat before rain.
All morning I wrote the word down on pages
riddled with drops of perspiration.
I practiced the word in my throat.
The teachers laughed and flashed baby-sitter smiles.
Right before the rain the sky pouted black.
Birds I had never seen before, black as Chinese ink –
but also iridescent blue – wove spirals into the air,
cawing as they scattered.
Then the rain redeemed us. Droplets pooled all the
.
It sounded like hawthorns plummeting against the thrifty metal roof.
Coolness descended in through
the window I had opened to taste the air.
I practiced words to understand the rain:
perfect, beautiful, good, ferocious, good.
The teachers cursed the rain and their sickly, small umbrellas.
I touched the water gathering on the sill,
thought of the word for pleasantly cool: .
It all seemed apt.

28. 25!
!
Erhai Hu
The pleasure boat eddies in circles about the lake.
Everywhere a picture to take. Naturally,
above deck, stand professionals
hired to snap you with a dancer: a girl
who sits upright and flits her fingers in a wave, who bends
her neck to single syllables and drums. Or with a boy
dressed like a monkey,
hopping, kicking to the side,
indulging every monocle and eye shutter by shouting
hya, hallo, sah, lay-dee.
Outside the wind assails
those who wonder drily how jumping would feel.
Some sit in the shade,
watching the unshaven mountains
as the boat whirls through the rapture.
On his own briefly, a boy holds a tiny heart
by its frilled, vermillion ribbon.
It whips in the railing-side gusts.
He fancies letting go,
doesn’t dare loose his grasp.

29. 26!
!
All the World Loves Penguins
In parts of Texas, China, and even Argentina,
there are young girls and grown men who find penguins cute,
because they waddle,
and because their upright shape is paired with smallness,
which makes oddness.
They mate for life – the adorable creatures;
the males sit on the egg – those precious masses of feathery fur!
They plop in the water and spin like dreidels.
But they couldn’t care less how they look, how their rollicking gait
charms the crowds
pressed against glass.
Most penguins just like the feel of slickness against their bellies,
much like otters prefer a good dive as opposed to the desert of land.
Most penguins want to eat a fish,
supper writhing under their beaks, the gasping eyes sliding down the hatch.
And they cannot help but sit on that egg,
there is no other option –
when sharks circle their rocky island,
or glacial hook,
or the themed world within the zoo.

30. 27!
!
On Hope
We’ve struck ocean.
Don’t you taste the acetic water?
We know a raft won’t cut it,
nor an empty gourd carry us across.
We have to dive with our heads
tucked to chin.
This place teems with neighbors,
each oxygenating for himself,
more alert to the sacks of flesh and their awkward thrashing hands
than to mackerel or plankton.
You don’t feel this way ever? When spinach water
spews against collarbone,
wraps around fleeting ankles?
It’s bitter tonic, this brackish sea,
its pinches, stings, gasps,
snags of corral against skin, wet flames,
and submerged shapes with damning fins.
Is there something we’re swimming for?

31. 28!
!
Lake
I had agreed to go
despite my own inclinations
to stay, to rest, to avoid doing
anything. Friendship
had sprung up and tangled itself into
the business of the lake,
so I had to go along;
the lake was my test.
Opaque light split the waters
into platinum and black.
Strands of algae floated, tangled
with the solitary reeds
stretching up from the muddy floor.
I thanked you profusely,
stripping my shirt and sitting in the chair,
shucking my shoes to the side,
running my hand across the heat-filled deck.
You snapped the lake into
dozens of memorialized colors,
perhaps catching the crimson leaves,
the trees’ uncontainable blush
under inspection’s gaze.
When night struck, we lit candles
and watched the moon as it swam
across the waters
blacker than the firmament.
I thanked you,
dipping a bare toe in the cool black,
my hand reaching for the wine,
thinking that this was friendship –
the resistance, the knot of agreement,
and the persistent, pleasurable bobbing of the deck.

32. 29!
!
Crocus Purple
The sticker proclaimed you could endure
frost, the bite of a chilly wind,
the braggart January gales.
We saw your claw of green breaking
the potter’s crumbly corpse of dirt
in the small adobe pot holding
the smaller, some-day purple plant.
The wind huffed,
stinging our necks and ears,
and in the time it took to walk home,
the green budding life withered inward,
back down to the earth it had been freeing itself from.
A week’s recuperation, even in the apartment’s greenhouse heat,
failed to resuscitate you. You perished, all $6.99 of you
with your brown rotting head.
A year later, on a walk with no plans
to revisit the cold, I saw a multitude
of purple flowers like the sticker had promised,
your insistent blades turned royal,
the delicate shells of your flower nonchalant under the sun.

33. 30!
!
Traces
One racing-striped chipmunk scuttles across the concrete,
leaps as high as forever could be to him,
somehow graceless, yet exquisite.
He bounds onto a streak of chalk animals
soon to be erased by feet, rain,
and the next children’s game.
Then he launches himself again,
toward a bristling hedge obscuring all sight,
intuiting that he’ll take to ground
on the other side,
as he had just done,
as he’ll do again.

34. 31!
!
Witching Hour
The balloon, printed like a tribal mask,
a striped demon, bobbed, patrolling the room
according to the laws of the current.
I thought this would be a perfect poem:
the looming tangerine face, its wraith insistence, the darkness
invading places mice might have been scurrying,
and the notion lingering in my head
that somewhere – and Salem wasn’t far – witches were near.
Snow had freakishly fallen the day before,
and the day before the snow I had seen a skunk
dash into a hole in an antiquated stone wall.
Inside that nest might’ve been chewed grape stems,
clomped bits of spotted blue jay eggs, wriggling larvae
and a dried head of garlic; maybe even skunk kits, their jagged hairs,
callow saucer eyes.
I couldn’t remember
if the fiend had clamped anything between its teeth
as it vanished into the hole.

35. 32!
!
Alligator Poem
They lurk everywhere:
on souvenir mugs, designer shirts, and sapphire blue sweats.
I have even heard
they inhabit the lake next to my house.
So whenever I run by, craning my neck,
I try to discern
the pot-hole nostrils, the dragon-hide back,
the stirring water.
One jogger was eaten right up.
I don’t recall how they knew she died that way –
perhaps a tennis shoe,
the earphones, somewhere
in a morbid mess as her last will.
Another man, on his evening walk,
jammed his ten fingers into a gator’s maw,
rescuing his ensnared dog.
The perpetrator retreated back to the muck.
The dog lived.
I’ve never seen on my jogs. Not next to the highway,
not over concrete bridges, not
along miniscule strips of water.
There’s nothing but the gnats caught in my hairline,
debris in my shoes,
and the caution: Always run in zig-zags,
from one eye’s vision to another’s.

36. 33!
!
Past Midnight in the Hospital
This is the place called Hospital,
where that woman, probably crazy, sitting atop a gurney in the hallway,
fusses with her elderly mother who holds the cloudy spoon.
The woman rumbles, skidding the wheels on the floor.
Here she will allow one bite,
one small morsel of rice,
then spit it in our direction.
We don’t exist; this is her hallway.
So we are fluorescent lights, door handles, stray
X-rays and empty saline pouches; we can’t be anything to her
because we are less than cheap bracelets.
Her parents daub her forehead, grasp at her wrists.
She whinnies and bucks. She’s their girl after all.
Must I not admit that she’s got a right to act manic,
and even if she just has the flu, this Hospital
could have stirred her dankest and most piecemeal of childhood memories?
Resurgences of public shame, when Ma pinched her arm
and scolded No No No!
But now the mother has jabbed the woman’s teeth with that spoon again.
They won’t let her rest, they’ll just keep watching
as if their daughter might die or disappear.

37. 34!
!
The Every Day Kind of Miracle
A morning conducts itself industriously. It’s simple –
but horrific, too, if you’re focused enough to see
ants who have been hacking to bits
the corpse of a praying mantis
since the previous night.
They’ve systematically
been carrying it away:
thorax, eyes, and legs.
Only the antennae and a wing-thread remain.
Light shakes the palm trees,
crackles the holly trees,
staunching the coolness of a house
built from stone and shale.
Morning supervises the work to be done,
avoiding superfluities like greetings,
or pausing to watch
sprinkler-cast droplets fall
into the opening buds of a blue phlox.
Before its time has run out,
the line of tasks –
mowing, shearing, stitching,
driving, sipping, plopping –
must be met
in the small space
allotted morning.

38. 35!
!
Sonnet from a (laowai)
Prepare a dumpling, please, I beg to you.
I’ve missed, from before, the delicious food
I would eat outside sanlitun. A few
mistakes can render baozi biting, crude
in flavor. Were I capable I’d make
the treat myself. Although ingredients
are hard to find, you also cannot fake
the skills. This tempting dish requires patience:
first wrap the scallions, pork and lettuce. Fry
in oil or steam until the wonton’s frills
crimp crisp and tight. And me, the ever-sly
abider, will sizzle like soup. They grill
desire upon a bite. Hot juice will spew
like holy floods – life enfolded good, new.

39. 36!
!
Boardwalk in Shanghai
Someone’s been playing music, sharing
his theme with the rest of the boardwalk drifters.
We are lying down, investigating life by exchanging stories:
the time I read satire and realized I was the fool; when she saw dark waters
and felt that nothing kept her from oblivion but her reflection,
because she has her mother’s eyes.
The disco music grows louder. Tourists atop French buildings
dance in mobs, cooing and caressing.
We walk the distance of the boardwalk,
seeing the same slumped bodies of exhausted travelers
changing only the face of sleep. Couples straddle the benches.
Families clump together.
We see children – barefoot, barechested – running outside the public toilets.
Claiming our own benches, my friend lies back, dangling her studded heels.
Patrol comes by, flashing a light into our eyes.
They assume we have fallen asleep.
They assume we are migrants, dislodged,
resting in the bold, open air.