HANS YANG

WHIPLASH

after Ocean Vuong 

---

Susan face cantilevered 
in the downpour. 

Susan 1997 Corolla. Ornament bison-blooded and terribly Chinese. 

Susan knee-deep in Red 40 oxycodone. Arguing against a barrage of jabs with knock-kneed
apologies. 

Susan balancing a Kirkland plate of aglio e olio on the Yamaha high-tom in her underwear.    

Susan snare(d-)
-rumming; rushing 
the suede body to a semicolon. 

Susan maple-and-tar. Under the porch swing. Tipping your chin up in July, thumb twitching bolt action for a smolder. Her trembling fingers bringing the cigarette to her bandaged nose like a nicotine-dahlia. Smiling, thinking you were a tom-boy

who could wrestle with their father.  Her barrette a wrong turn in a black-blue bun. Index and ring on your forehead like a wet, taut trigger. The blur of it.  Joan, don’t be a little motherfucker. The X-ACTO knife in her left palm pearling dizzyingly. The estuary of ruby running down her flanks like a chewed calf.  Joan, I’m done 

throwing bricks. I’m done dreaming. Susan dusk-kissed, 

sliding topless through the wilted rhubarb grove. Susan taking a step forward or maybe one back.  Susan with begging elbows looped in a net. Susan AP chemistry was an allegory 

for sex. Susan holing the bass-drum. Susan flirting with a stop sign after midterms because there were no worthy men in the area. Susan only boys that drove her 

to the line of becoming lesbian. Susan who claimed to feel stronger when she doused  her tips with L’Oreal blonde, biceps stitched against the stunted Steinway, spraying stopstopstop like a bad polyrhythm, 

shoulders churning to wrangle the 42-inch Columbia strap. Ting xia, he panted,  No more snare, no more. Sound like tank-boom from the nanjing massacres. Yes?  Susan peeling away under the Moutai-ghosts of the chandelier,

 stamping 
the buckle of the belt against her forehead. 

Ba, the only war is here. 

Susan jumproping five-hundred times for free chive-and-chicken potstickers under the cover of twilight. Susan hair dripping in Chanel-tinged euphoria sleeping

 through the dating game show. Susan on CCTV 5, smashed on the oil of the couch like a plate of ground meat. At the San Diego Zoo there was a potbellied-fucker that plunged into the chimp exhibit. Susan breaking curfew, 

a sugar bottle with callused oak-arms, reddening with each step further from the asphalt. There was a docile monkey named Kiki, a small mound of fur, perplexed as fuck. Her hair pulled like silk from a gorilla’s scalp, 

That damn psycho kept throwing things at her, and he bore it, signing in that language of confusion with her paws.  She bore it until there was blood. And Kiki curled her wrists around that brick like Ohtani up at the plate, and dropped that bitch with a fastball.  Like– for a second, she was slack-eyed, a deity. 

Susan laughing, 

Can you imagine? That power? 

fetching the Remington from the garage. Your toes skittering sassafras on the tiles,  

I’m dirt-cold. 

deep in love. Susan peering through the catching clasp of the shotgun. 

I’m not no slut no Everlast daughter, not no mother. Tell me, 

That lump in your throat rising like sealed yeast– you won’t forget it 

when he comes around the corner, I’ll be a chipped door. Tell me, 

because an ocean once told you that memory

if I’m the best, if I’m barely here

 is a flood. 

if i’m 

Susan 

 upping the practice-sessions to six hours, to the leather-sung bleeding. 

Because Caravan won’t play itself,

 and since Julliard is a place of worship.  Because Ba could not bear to be a herbivore, 

not even for one night– 

and the words will still be wrong– scrunched up– hunted and throbbing in her larynx, in the womb 

of that yellow cab to Social Services. Because that aurora borealis of bruises smothering her underbelly will grow 

into a father’s field, and the war is still out there shuddering in that little patch of violet torrent, out there

in the autumn darkness– smiling and caged in a lightning-traced file cabinet from the sixties in a building 

somehow there. Because the dream is still alive,  and it was all

 she wanted, all this time– not like you thought, gathering her morphine needles from the carpet in an evening 

of ebbing plastic, listening to her flowering     

in another room to empty. The sun-studded triplets, impaled by the cymbals edging at a scream.  

Hanging, that emblazoned comma of the glass exhibit, that anthem 

of the chimpanzee raising a silent brick, its wrinkled paw caught in a 

snare. That cantilevered face in the downpour. 

Then, the quiet, 

heaving sobs. 

Caravan – difficult drum solo. 

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