Grace Shuyi Liew

In A Simplified Language, Tell Me About The Weight Of Sounds

When I first met my mother she was conducting electricity

 

I was born of a feeling

 

Light

 

Just light

 

I died and came back to life in her still-flat belly

 

Her washed heart stopped completely for two-three beats

 

When she opened her eyes to the smell of hot lightning a feeling rose inside me

 

A charred gold band on her ring finger

 

Surely one keeps such mementos of life and grief

 

Rubbish

 

She sent the bad ring back to the goldsmith for a new one that same day

 

She didn’t believe in luck

 

It must have been a fake

 

Real gold is incorrigible even by the hottest fires

 

And fate is unknowable

 

I am now past the age she was yet birthday after birthday nothing changes

 

Even the most blameless part of this same sky has rolled on its belly

 

I am still not courageous enough to discard the blackened golds of my life

 

Fate is every mouth that has lovingly damaged my language

 

I still kiss those mouths

 

Let them grow heavy on mine

 

Intuition is optional

 

I look closely at people’s faces

 

Decide what they need

 

In a small game on my phone

 

I give a woman a cup of frowns

 

I lob the left ear off a man

 

It is not easy to give up even the things that don’t suit you anymore

 

We grieve hardest our lost prejudices

 

For they once pinned us in our places

 

Put a sky over our heads

 

Painted it an acceptable white

 

But I am not this we

 

My grief is categorically inaccessible to those whose paths to desire cut through mine

 

All my revelations arrive a decade too late; I have so many things to clarify

 

I just wish you knew how to ask what I want to be asked

 

My tendency to return to language isn’t inborn

 

The humiliated child’s only chance at unhumiliating herself is not a time machine but a stiff neck

 

I know too many Englishes

 

One, of dad’s colonial headmistress

 

Mrs. ________.

 

Spare the rod and spoil the child

 

That sort of biblical perversity that ransacked our kutu-filled hair

 

Roughened up our tongue to halt the slipping of words

 

Then, of mom’s grownup English workbook

 

A secretarial diction that drapes over your village stink

 

No she did stink unmetaphorically of drying sulphury rubber

 

Tropical bounty sunned to tautness

 

Some as big as warplane tires

 

Or small as pencil erasers we gnaw off

 

Later, of undersea cables that flower into colloquialisms and aphorisms

 

Each loose yarn’s unlocateable origin transmuted into a pang in the stomach

 

Try not to read this as ethnography

 

The British Empire subsisted on the bones of these stories in those final decades

 

Put your best intentions into something real, like a garden

 

Pangs are discernible only by their briefness

 

Sometimes a shot in the stomach

 

A flutter on the cheek

 

I feel even me closing in on myself

 

Whether or not bleeding a chicken out is primitive or interesting depends on

 

Who is doing the bleeding and who is doing the worship

 

To disregard a poet over self-doubt is like firing your plumber for having too many tools with which she unclogs your toilet

 

I am willing to be sacrificed to the sum of apprehension

 

Reticence pulled apart from disgrace

 

Having grown up caressing fields of Grass That Contains Shame

 

Small rows of small leaves that shrink to fold at the slightest external stimuli

 

The tip of my finger

 

Only to reopen seconds later

 

I am not this grass whose intelligence has been scientifically measured

 

To decide after repeated pummeling by the same stimuli that it will no longer react

 

The ability to self-impose a limit upon which transgression one ceases all performances of identity

 

Restraint is merely this ability to trade one kind of safety for another

 

A learnable trait while sprawled on low ground

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Grace Shuyi Liew is the author of Prop (Ahsahta Press, 2016) and Book of Interludes (Anomalous Press, 2016). She is from Malaysia and currently resides in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.