Jonathan Han
Hong Kong

I

Considering this-is
not the motherland...
but a silverware
skyline, a table-
cloth without the green
of a mountain range
or the fisherman's
blue, but just the sheets
of a shantytown

clipped around the collar
of the dammed Pearl River.

September's city,
dashed with rain, leans on
her hills; her rigging
folds on the hard lap
of the harbour,
and her mind wanders
like a five-year-old
from the dinner table,

but just now recalled and
sitting by her mother.

II

The day we meant to sweep the tombs
I was playing with the pods of a catalpa.
I peeled the translucent womb open and plucked
its beady core. I then arranged a litter

of dark brown pods around the furnace,
and laced flowers back up on their frail branch.
With each flower, I heard something else thrown
into the furnace: bags heavy with paper ingots,

a card-board castle. Then someone popped
open the trunk, and pulled out an effigy
of a woman, a product of papier-mâché,
and tossed her into the crackling mouth of our ancestors.

So much ash. So much litter.
So we sweep. We sweep.

III

The start of
an old rhyme
about magpies:

One for
sorry;
two for
joy; three
for a funeral...

An English rhyme
about magpies.
How appropriate
for such a poem

that I borrow grief
from another land.

IV

For the wrath of man
works not the righteousness of
God, not this time-myself

now a continent
away. A distant protest
is worse than a silent one.

But the frost coating
the lips of my window brings
a drop of winter

dew to the morning,
a tropical reminder
of the place I left

so comfortably.

The wrath of man... What
wrath? That wrath? That wrath-
when I powdered the driveway
with table salt? Or

when the mosquitoes
continued to breed and bloody
in November? That

season of two
winters, that crooked
season. All those

steel frames, so many
edged with rime. So many without.
But the glass stays clear,

and I see the world.

V

The rain left dots in the snow leftover
as though practicing acupuncture.

I still live amidst the cities of the plain,
but I have pitched my tent west.

VI

Mother.
I have said what
I have said, and I know,
Mother, even you will not have
my bones.

_ _

Jonathan Han is a jack-of-four-trades (jay-walking, eating quickly, computer solitaire, waving) and a master of one: creating pseudonyms. He is a past editor of The Journal of the Core Curriculum, and was principal organizer of the 2018 Boston Student Publishing Conference for Bonfire Press.

>> Back to Issue 21, 2018