JONATHAN CHAN

a poem for Milton

‘After long days in the rice fields, Um-ma came home to the round clay walls and thatched straw roof of our single room hut, smiling at me. We lived there together until the village elders decided that a Black child brought too much shame onto the village and Um-ma and I had to leave.’
             Milton Washington, Slickyboy 

‘We are all orphans, orphans who aren’t orphans. Angels who aren’t angels. We too cried. We too sang, oblong oblong.’ 
             Don Mee Choi, DMZ Colony

---

as tin upon a thatched roof                          as the forced retrofit of

             an apparatus,        consider a boy, flesh made

from flesh, stamped upon a bifurcated      body,      an imperial

–

             insertion, rifles, khaki, and voices in sing-song. 

one chain of concertina

                                                    here, one row of fences 

                          there, and from within,    the everflowing sweetness 

             of rock and roll, oreos, fig newtons, 

coca-cola a bribe

                                       and bounty,       dangled from the palms of another

                           boyfriend,            a plausible facsimile

              for a father. his hand stretched across her mouth, gasps

smothered           in a small studio apartment,          a Black boy curled

                                       into a blanket, ears covered, waiting for the crack

–

             of a bugle’s call. chain-wire rattles.             a taxi appears in a thickness

of smoke. the boy’s body rinsed, disabused, on a black porch.           lips parched for a taste

–

             of makgeolli, the gulps of air        on a stolen bicycle,           the unknowing of

a long dirt road. until umma vanishes into the wetness 

–

                          of a paddy field, cotton still clinging

                                       to her skin. and the boy feels her visage vanish

                                                                              as a cinder. 

–

             and feels the pressure rise             eyeing another Black boy

                          in the orphanage. and seeing one day, another Black GI and

                                       his fine, fine wife,                        the dream of a world

             of Blackness, grasped by clinging to his leg and screaming,

                          ‘No!

                                       Andwae! 

                                                                 No!’

–

                                       until it is no longer

                                                    a dream,

                                       that good old American

                                                    thing.

in Myanmar they have come for the poets

and the students and the doctors and the
young. they have come to make targets of
toddlers and ash of teenaged girls. there is no
redemption in the razing of bullets, the tearing
of skulls, the puncturing of ambulance doors.
they have come for the nuns who kneel, arms
stretched from east to west, children cushioned
by shields of flesh, for the police who flee through
forests and rivers, horror laced in ribbons of water,
whispers echoing off mountainside crags. they have
come for the monks on procession, for cycles are
more than mere spasms. for how can a soul desire
nothing when there is nothing left to desire? they
have come to choke the throats that sing: their
noxious fumes that stun and blind, the mingling
of dust and the soot of books. in Myanmar they have
come for the poets: blood severed from the heart,
rivers cut open wide, unsent letters rattling in
emptied cells.

First published in the jfa human rights journal (“in Myanmar they have come for the poets”)

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