tug of war
can’t find a place for myself / between the Taipei one oh one and the Petronas Towers / how many times have I seen them on the skyline / lit up with fireworks/on fire under city sun / and yet I still can’t find/a me-shaped shadow / between them / because both are to an extent / utterly foreign to me / maybe it’s the western liberal news i read / or my American school / or my globe-scattered friends / each one with a hand grasping / my hair my pinky finger my ankle / bruising and grabbing in a game / of tug of war and I am the rag doll being / torn asunder between it all
lost her name
the lion heads on the cul-de-sac
snarl at her when she comes knocking
excuse me, do you—
but quietly moan at the loss of their own
(manes worn and names forgotten)
on the south side of this coalescence
of a city that is supposed to offer her
the secrets and half-formed dreams that she’s
been on the hunt for: bow strung and quiver empty.
you need a license for a bow
but she’s never been stopped on the streets
and even if she is, there is nothing
on her ID. nothing to see here.
she tucks it into the officer’s jacket—
it’s of no use to her or him (no
social security or even personal security)
because she wouldn’t even be able to
give a childhood nickname or
those runny syllables of a baby’s attempt
to pronounce her own birthright.
she thinks she remembers her
time in the womb, the crooning
of her mother with a list of
names, testing the unfamiliar syllables
out to see if any of them sang
to the flower within her but
enveloped in weightless placenta,
there was nothing to hear except the
throb of her own heartbeat, the one
fully-formed part of her.
soda drinker, freedom runner, school skipper,
stepping-on-the-sidewalk-cracks-girl
sends out missing flyers in search of
that thing her mother gave her at birth
when she was squalling at the bite
of fluorescent love and the rubber
hands that plucked her from
the blissful void. it is missing
(must have slipped out of
that hole in her jeans, the one where she tried
to mend with pink thread and forgot
to tie the knot, open-ended
she’s always been forgetful (a
leave-the-keys-in-the-ignition-girl
and a bread burner), and she leaves
her window open: cavity in the red brick.
the flyers spiral out and
one is snatched out of the air
by that old man down the street
with half a leg and three quarters
of a dog and he burns it. His mutt howls.
the smoke writhes up
towards her window, caresses calcified glass
with a hint of a name,and lets itself fall into that
lover’s embrace that is the unforgettable,
the unattainable. the planes flying above
radio in with their special signs for her:
artemis girl, arrowless, nameless
EXODUS
genesis, exodus, leviticus, something something judges ruth-less
the familiar chant exhales from his lips
and melts into the bullet smoke:
a prayer for the others that haven’t noticed him slump
he wanted to have his name written in
the family Bible with the cherub-wing paper,
because black beading on the page before
Genesis with the names of his gramps and second cousin
once removed was the only way that his gramma would
remember him and his fallen leaves existence
that’s what she called him: her drifting
boy, the one that was blown away when
the war started, the one whose branch
was already bare, gnawed tusk,
mottled ivory, when the draft began.
he sent her letters in paper airplanes,
stained papers, ink dripping
like mini Mekongs and swirling
with rusted red from the factories
of flesh and skin and bone that lined
the military parades and the grainy television
screens. they were still black and white
so you couldn’t see the damage in technicolor—
only the sharp lines of the uniforms and the glint
of medals and the silver eyes. that’s what
they came home from the war like:
bullet-riddled and broken in straight lines,
draped in flags: a lover’s embrace.
he wanted his name written before Genesis
so his gramma would remember his birth
and not his exodus with all the others,
marching into the jungles, mist-wrapped.
Yong-Yu Huang is a Taiwanese teenager who has lived in Malaysia all her life. Her current favorite self-descriptory adjective is “culturally-confused.” She has been previously published in The Heritage Review and the bitter fruit review. When she is not overthinking things, she can be found binging Doctor Who or playing the flute.