STORY CAST FROM BLOOD

The man looked in the mirror and said, “Here is a story cast from our blood,” then seated himself at a wooden chair next to his son’s bed. He lifted a heavy book from the nightstand. The cover was carved from leather but had no lettering. He opened the book and turned the first page, which was blank, as was every other page in the book, and then he began to tell the story.

“Out of the stars came three small gods, not much bigger than you or I. These three small gods were named Dragon, Phoenix, and Unicorn. Dragon, wisest of the three, exhaled paint and ink and breathed stories much like the one I tell to you now. Phoenix, brave and stalwart, with a beak sharper than any sword, could stand before any army and give them cause to kneel. Unicorn, invincible in his virtue, spun righteousness out from the air with his spiraled horn. Dragon was the Poet, Phoenix was the Soldier, and Unicorn was the Judge, the three most essential ways of being that we humans know.

“As soon as the three small gods had come to life they looked upward and gazed upon the sculpted shoulder of the waxing Moon. Bare and perfect and yet shrouded by the cover of gossamer clouds, this shoulder did as all aspects of women may sometimes do, and inspired the hearts of the three small gods such that they immediately fell in love with the Moon. They called out to her. She blushed, and shrugged away their attentions, but the three gods would not be so dissuaded. Each god burned with a ferocious and indomitable love. For this love, each god pleaded his case.

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THE MIDNIGHT SHOWING AT THE DRIVE-IN THEATER

The loudest thing in his ears was the scrambling of pebbles down the mountain’s face and Giang wondered if this is what he would hear if someone detonated nuclear weapons inside Antarctica’s frozen heart. He reached up, straining with the effort, and his fingertips pressed against random indentations. His right foot, then his left foot, found further purchase. The wind had been harsh and biting just moments before but now it was still. He looked below, telling himself inside his head that he was simply checking his footholds, but really he was trying to see if the man in the black suit remained at the bottom of the mountain’s face. The man was there. By this time the man had put his gun away, content to watch. Giang perspired heavily. The thin cotton shirt on his back felt like a thousand pounds of tears. He continued to climb.

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MIGRATION CYCLES

I am a puppy. I have a black nose which is always wet to the touch. My tongue is small and red. My head seems slightly larger than it should be for the size of my paws; the pads are soft and uncracked. They feed me small pieces of cooked meat under the table. I crane my neck upward, licking rapidly where I can reach. Sometimes they shy away and sometimes they remain. In their fingerprints I can taste a myriad of things: ink from a pen used to sign a check; blush from a cheek recently touched; sweat, like salt. The voices that accompany the hands are like migrant birds, never stationary, and I cannot distinguish one from another. My fur is very soft. My eyes are very wide but I do not see much from so close to the ground. I run over the hardwood floors and thick carpets and the linoleum, sometimes stumbling, mostly stumbling. Mostly stumbling.

They push me underneath the bed. They hold my jaws shut until I do not try to speak. I can hear everything: the whispers are the most audible things, those shifting words spoken with such confidence. I wonder when I will be fed. I inhale: a sudden and forceful hate. I do not scramble out from my place which is dark and safe. When next will I be cradled in their arms? There is a shout. He holds her jaws shut until she does not try to speak. I do not have the claws, I do not have the fangs. They will forgive me. We always return to the fingerprints who have thieved the best from us.

IT’S NOT YOU IT’S ME

You are a distance
measured from counter-edge to closet door.
You are infinite paces
and each footfall transmits through skin
three diatribes, spoken softly (not quite a whisper):

The gown was red or black and it did not fall
in waves, as proper gowns and proper girls ought to fall.
Two alarm clocks, stacked upon each other, sharing time.
If there were a ceiling fan
it should have spun quite slow.

Replace the heel which snapped in two and
resummon out of Versailles your scent.
It travels well, with carriage, coach-and-four.
And you, left shoulder bare, deliver:
a disjointing out of a silver necklace, plain.

The ceiling fan spins quite low.

HOW TO BE A GRACIOUS GUEST

I had few expectations when I knocked on the apartment door. I had little information upon which to base expectations, and I was a young man of limited imagination. The facts were as follows: she was thirty-something, with red hair and brown eyes; she worked in one of the dozen banks scattered throughout the city; she did not like ice cream, at all; she really admired Cate Blanchett as an actress but would admit that part of her admiration stemmed from the idea that Cate Blanchett was the actress whom she most resembled in physical appearance. These were the facts she listed in her Craigslist advertisement for a thirty-something woman seeking a younger, skinny, Asian man for a casual encounter.

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DRIVING WITHOUT AIR CONDITIONING THROUGH SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

This is not a true story. As a favor to someone I was driving a car without functioning air conditioning. My route was simple: straight up the 405 which turns into the 5 then the 99; a surgical incision, inviting malpractice lawsuits with its jagged crook through the middle of California. It was June, the incline just before the peak of summer. The wind burst hot over and around half-raised windows. The car’s audio system was off-balance: vocals drifted lazily out from the front speakers as the bass thrum-thrummed through my bones. The back of my t-shirt clung to my shoulder-blades. I had not had much sleep the prior night and so I fought to stay awake. I pulled into a rest area and napped for thirty minutes, then resumed the drive.

Two hours later, with the stink of California’s dairy industry heavy in the air, still-hot, the sun refused to set. It cast its fist, its glare, across the top of my field of vision. The highway meandered flat and unimpressive. The speedometer wavered at eighty-four miles per hour. The pace felt appropriate.

But a woman drove past on my right, going at least ninety in a Honda CR-V. Its box-frame burned the periphery of my vision, tan paint not quite sufficing for camouflage against the impermanent backdrop of shit-towns, shit-fields, and gas stations. I watched as she pulled up behind a truck and was forced to slow drastically, to seventy-five, then seventy, and slower yet. I passed, and looked at her: her dark skin, her dark hair, her serious jaw. She could have been twenty-five or thirty-six. Such a small victory, reclaiming a lost place, but I smiled to myself anyway.

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SOME KIND OF EDUCATION

Her face was not pressed against the window of the car.
Her eyes did not travel.
She asked a question:
I responded: “I can knock things over too.”
First the cabinet, wood and glass;
second the shower curtain and curtain-rod.
She asked a question:
I filled my ears with crooks, clinging

Made from vinyl

Way loved vinyl. His earliest memory was of vinyl: his hands pawed at a black circle rotating in lazy, even circles; there was also the smell of roast duck; his mother’s skirt and hairstyle emulated Jackie Kennedy instead of Nancy Reagan; his father’s glasses, like an artifact out of the 1950s, rested on an end table. He discarded the love of all these things except for the vinyl. When he went to study at Berkeley, he left behind an empty home and his given name, Jiang Wei. His father thought it a romantic notion to name him for a character out of the historical mythology that flowed through the blood of all romantic Chinese men. Way hated the name, hated his father for it, even after the car accident, and the funeral at which he did not cry, though both his parents were now dead. Way studied literature, paying for his tuition with his substantial inheritance.

Way met Gwen at Berkeley. She was a British expatriate and acted appropriately: “the sun never sets on the British empire”, she’d say, laughing brightly. Secretly she believed it. She slept with a collection of Rudyard Kipling’s short stories underneath her pillow. She took afternoon tea by herself in one of her dormitory’s lounges, looking out at the San Francisco Bay through expansive windows, pretending to be contemplating Great Things. Every three-and-a-half minutes, she flipped a strand or two of blonde hair out from over her eyes, even if the hair were not obstructing her view. Way did not know these things when he met her at a record store, except that she was British, and had blonde hair. Eventually he learned everything about her that there was to know, and probably more than that. But in the record store, Way was concerned primarily with why this girl was trying to find Nico and the Velvet Underground.

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LP3: 07 08 2008

hột vịt lộn

fight makes right
claims the dripping juice from boiled duck embryo still-in-shell
so drops, on ornamental plate, congeal.
its designs like yours are bold and unafraid
brush-tip freckles, but sparse
and the metal is from a different age.
fist for fight
crushing the unborn duck:
the broth sinks through gaps in fingers
and should you permit the selfsame hands in stringent hair
then i have the right to destroy another.