Poetry

what happened to karl marx?

What happened to Karl Marx? Have you seen him?
I looked for him under the bed
and behind the couch.
He doesn’t seem to be anywhere.

He called me the othe day,
But he didn’t say anything on the other line.
I knew he would be late for dinner
so I went into the forest and searched for him.
And when that wasn’t good enough,
I walked to China and called his name,
but heard no answer.

After many nights, I found him.
I seemed to see him everywhere.
He was trapped in a photograph and kept saying my name,
asking me to help him get out.
Then I saw him at a subway station.
He had tried to throw himself in front of a train,
but he fell underneath.
Poor Karl Marx, always so clumsy.

Later I saw him sitting next to Lenin and I asked him
what he thought about the way things had turned out.
He asked me if we could leave now.
So I took his hand, his frail-wrinkled-warmishcold hand
and led him to the stairs,
and we gingerly walked past the revolutions waving hello to us
the smiling corpses (they knew of their victory?)
the dirty rags, bicycles, and peasants
the kings and emperors soaking their feet in a communal sink
the lawyers and artisans hanging like swaying leaves and cherries.

I bought Karl Marx a cup of coffee
and we talked about the weather.

where i'm from

I am from long family conversations in the living room
I am from open palms and open minds,
old photographs, washed-out chopsticks, and Chinese newspaper clippings.

I am from those summers I can’t forget,
from the docks in North Carolina to the parks in Beijing,
tractor rides and taxi rides, ginger ale and green tea,
speaking English and Chinese
separate worlds intricately, effortlessly woven into one.

I am from airports, the most beautiful place to see
people reunite and others embark on a new journey.
I am from seeing Washington, D.C. from thirteen-thousand feet
and recognizing home with a touch of comfort, and sadness.

I am from a small Chinese restaurant in Maryland,
where a waiter named David from China met
a red-haired customer named Melissa for the first time.

I am from Lydia and Hannah, names my mother almost named me,
identities I might have had, but slipped through a grasp
that didn’t belong to me.

I am from a home that once always had people coming and going,
now dying of emptiness, a haunting lonely seeping through
our marble floors and high ceilings, taking form on my
grandmother’s forlorn, wrinkled face.

I am from the day my mother left my father, the day I dropped out of Chinese school,
the day I didn’t say goodbye to my dying great-grandfather, the day I
wore my school uniform for the last time, the day my brother stopped laughing.

I am from the pale hands of my mother
the smooth hands of my father
the thick hands of my grandfather
the cold hands of my grandmother,
the people in my life that have all played a role in
delicately crafting and shaping who I am.

the way we settle

what’s love but an empty vessel
i’d say he broke my heart
while i was grasping at straws for his
but how can you claim something
that wasn’t yours to begin with

firsts

it’s february in the city and
his palm is on my knee
i’m young, tentative, exhilarated

split the peanuts, this bread with me
i don’t want to dance, he says
i just want to sit here with you

the crinkles around his eyes
crease deeper each time he laughs, and suddenly
i feel so shy and lovely in front of him

he drapes his shirt around my shoulders
and we’re writing our names in black marker
staining the bar’s ceiling with a memory of
the people we were that winter

it’s a scary thing to look at someone
and feel yourself light up
with such raw, sincere hope

lights

Wait for the whisper you stand
staring at the wide spatial vastness, the
river before you and the stars smiling at you
faltering in their fake smiles, bright
too bright to be believable. Watch and you are suddenly
alone in a space that belongs to you. you own you,
your skin, the way your skin looks when it’s wet
when you look down at your hands and see the
fabric, the history, the trace of lines across your palms
like spiders or spiderwebs full and intertwined
little flowers or cocaine lines crafted, woven
drifting across your open palm. Touch, touch, feel.
Your hands, they embody you. your hands are what
you make of them.

Steal a touch that doesn’t belong to you
Caress the underside of a face
Trace the outline of a shape, of a body, of a teacup
Thumb through pages and pages of books I love
Shakespeare, Wilde, Kissinger and
tuck a piece of your hair behind your ear.
These are you, these are me, these are us,
Us in an intricate world of complex traces and circles
that may ultimately lead me here
or there or to you, or back to me. You don’t know
you are the essence of your hands. They never forget.

Make love. Make passion if it’s not there.
Force it out of your smoke-clogged lungs, the bottom of the
bottom of your gut, the place where it hurts the most
when you find out someone you love dies.
Let it pour through your veins, exude through the tips of
your fingernails and tips of your tongue, seep
through your flushed skin, revealing secrets that are sitting darkly,
waiting to vigorously lurch and climb out with each breath
Let it take charge of you, no, make it take charge of you
Take me by the shoulders and press me against the wall so
my arms will fly out, fingertips dragging on the wall from my clutch,
a grasp so strong, so vehement, so loud.

I want to hear the sex from the crack of your voice, I want it to
stretch and expound until the loose ends can no longer be
pulled any further. I want to search for that silent part of you that yearns,
begs to come out and taste me, taste the wine and the passion.

I want to shake it out of you
Kiss it until it pours and bleeds, pull it out of your locked arms with all my violence.
I want you alive, alive and pulsing, and I want to a slide a red fire between your lips, sparking your peak, staining you with ink so irrevocable and permanent.
I never want you to be silent with me again.

Close your eyes and the world is upside down
we walk side-by-side on the crescent slides,
leaping from star to star, feeling the burn
and the gleam from a thousand lights radiating beneath our feet
Above us is grass, sweet, crisp prickles of green staring
back at us, the flowers and weeping willows,
the stares and the smiles, the hair tosses and head nods

The curve of your red lips as your slip a smile no
one else notices, but me. The people below us, the tiny
worlds that exist among us, beyond us, the stars
dancing into the moonlight, the shine below that swallows us,
enveloping us into an embrace where we drift and
we glide on crescents, clouds, and purity. Innocence is alive,
white and rich in cream, smoothing over our nose bones,
mumbling dreams and memories, taking us to a realm
where sunsets never disappear, everything is okay
and will always be okay, a clandestine world where
questions don’t exist and change doesn’t cause the world
to tumble and collapse.

Slips of shivers classify a living space, a cloud belonging to
no one and us. We are us, you and me.
Let us walk and float. Float upstream until I can find your face,
feel the bridges and fields, the curtain of eyelashes and the smooth eyebrows
Your breathing, you in your sleep emitting your beauty, charm
Something I can’t quite place but find inexplicably beautiful

I can see it when we are lying in the sky, drinking white wine
and you pass me the bottle and your shirt is off, crumpled and discarded
in a corner belonging to not even you, because you are not worriedyou stare
straight ahead and your eyebrows arch and your smile curves and I can see it.
I know you don’t want to say anything to spoil such a moment,
the still perfection in silence, the soft breeze of the wind, the wry tilts of our smiles
and so you look at me and I know we believe that
there is no where else we’d rather be.