Tranche De Vie

My life in slices.

[hyacinthswithbiscuits]

On Posts, Poetry and Prose

This is it.

This is the last day of the March Slice of Life challenge, as one could probably surmise from the influx of posts with titles along the lines of “A Bittersweet Goodbye to SOL” or “Thank God It’s Over: I Have Bio Objectives Due Soon and I Don’t Need Any More of This”. I have to disagree with my peers who resonate with the latter statement. Throughout this entire month — with all its highs and lows — I was able to get an unprecedented glimpse inside the fascinating (and occasionally, surprising) thoughts of my classmates, learn about new and interesting topics, and, most importantly, improve my writing.

At first, I was averse to the idea of writing a blog post every day. But Slice of Life allowed me to write about experiences that I normally would not have reflected upon, and focus on conventional, ephemeral moments of my life in acute detail. Every day of blogging felt liberating, like I was able to spew word salad and write in a relaxing stream-of-consciousness style (though admittedly, I got lazier towards the end and started writing shorter poems). Also, since Tumblr was more isolated from the rest of the SOL blogs, I felt like I was writing only for myself, and that was really enjoyable.

Writing in verse was the best part. Aside from the advantage of using up more white space to look more productive, writing poetry allowed me to take in those details of my life verse by verse, stanza by stanza. Most would complain about having to meet the deadline of 11:59, but I thought it was refreshing, calming even, to write a poem each day.

Most importantly, SOL enabled me to explore my thoughts about the world and my experiences in a single verse. Through quiet introspection, I was able to look at details in my life with a sharper eye.

This has been great, really. Thank you, Mrs. Gross.

[hyacinthswithbiscuits]

Snapshots of Beijing

Song Shi

Tang dynasty poems

are four lines each, breaks between cadences each character a curve, iron hook, slicing black scissor slashes against textbook paper. I know every line like wrinkles in my palms.

Study

Let’s go outside, she tells me,

in the classroom with faded posters sleeping on gray walls,

announcing the first conquest of the Cultural Revolution and the corollary

to the Pythagorean theorem (never mind that everyone is still at their desks  — we were never ones for studiousness, anyway).

我可以去洗手间吗?

She’s already out the air before five minutes if puffed out from our math teacher’s cigar.

Drinking Alone

I am no

Li Bai, for instead of wine I drink the laws of thermodynamics  — I pass time under the home screen of a Nokia rather than moonlight.

Spring Scene

My handwriting quivers at each dash in my own name,

and formulas dissolve from my memory

as they leak from the tip of my pen

mingling with the paper,

lost within the marginalia of futile doodles on the corner of

my crinkled pages.

Gobi

I wonder, blinking out dirt, minerals,

if a wandering Mongolian nomad

had touched the same grain of sand, perhaps,

or had his hair rustled by the same breeze.

Susurrant

I do not need blankets when I have the lisping voice of Su Song to sing me to sleep.

Night

I find her sitting by the flagpole,

cross-legged under a banner of red and gold. and she silences me from scaring away the stars.

Stargazers

We both know that under the smog-filled sky the fiery comet we just saw

was most likely the flight to Kuala Lumpur.

[hyacinthswithbiscuits]

Thanks

You taught me how to bite gashes into flesh made out of words and taste the rejuvenating juices inside. You showed me how to carve sentences out of iron phrases, how to mold them out in hot hands, singing sides burning into blue veins, frigid rashes, two bright red slashes against each palm. 

[hyacinthswithbiscuits]

My oblivious father is suddenly an instrumental connoisseur, as he never fails to remind me. That, he points to a Russian girl, violin shaded by her slick, protruding bun, spine pulled as tight as a fishing wire, is a good one, from 1880 or so. You can tell by the sound - the slender apparatus howls out a low, lone note horsehair bristles vibrating against each dark string - rich, he remarks, isn’t it? Rich, indeed, I say, an adjective that will never apply to us if we decide that a Steinway would look nice on our living room

[hyacinthswithbiscuits]

Elegy to Zayn

Swing sets in spring sound like the smell of warm sand dirt on the lace edges of socks, rubbing against cracking metal bars orange brown triangles of iron pressing against our thighs. You said that if you had to choose, you’d pick Niall out of the blades of coarse curled hair strong as morning breath after soaking teeth in spearmint toothpaste. I think he’s the least fake, you said, as if one could be fake in the first place, to me anything that was skin and flesh and bones was real enough, I didn’t need anyone to validate that.

[hyacinthswithbiscuits]

Still Life in Gray

An unworn orange dress sits inside my closet, tangerine Russian nesting doll capped between denim and the suffocating folds of polyester.

[hyacinthswithbiscuits]

A & P

sensory today I bit into your soft skin velvet like tarnished Cezanne still life, and you tasted like a mango, juice and all, sticking into my plastic hair, burning the insides of my paper cuts. (I think you are a swollen apple in disguise.)

cardiology they say that they  are drummed out on fingertips, each pulse with perfect syntax, synchronized life flashing in time like Rockette dancers in lines of seven. I say that pulses are spilled out like pus, popping out of sockets and seeping into bedsheets. witness my heart’s cartography laid out in swiping splatters.

respiratory the first time I stopped was when thirteen. I long to feel that sweet rush of coolness in my lungs again.

[hyacinthswithbiscuits]

Limbs

I ask you to come and hold my bitten hands sandpapered knuckles peeling white, seafoam of keratin accruing against nail beds. Rake your rusting nails in my paper hair  — I am a paper doll with cold fingers and the stale smell of death written in by throat. Please tell me, is this my Dream House or a morgue?

[hyacinthswithbiscuits]

Taxonomy On Ruled Paper

bio seventy-five minutes of holding my breath, swimming in scribbled post-its that fan my binders like yawning yellow cat tails.

linnaeus how unfair it is, I think, pencil thudding against my hollow desk, that some cannot survive without others.

helicase unwind me and hear the sweet pops of hydrogen bonds, please splice my broken bases back together.

mitosis I am nothing but a cell series of cells, to be exact, piling myriads upon myriads, dividing into twos and forty-nines, purple splotches of noodles pulling and coalescing, asexual rendezvous on microscopic terrain.

anatomy your spine is a cytoskeleton that runs through phospholipid membranes, reeking of carbon and stringency.

ionic it’s never too safe to ask me to give up something in exchange for a connection (covalence is key).

cytokinesis I watch you crumble split off at one point at your dilated center, dividing into twos, forty-nines, on to seven hundreds.

[hyacinthswithbiscuits]

Sea Cucumber Stew (Or What I Should Have Said)

They said that you lectured

so that tiered classrooms would bulge with body heat from dozens of crossed feet on tiled floors, rows of legs hanging off of windowsills like dangling denim bells on swollen wind chimes. But your students sketched notes on Rhett Butler’s dialogues and the interpretation of deus ex machina in Welles — no, not the six films of cap-wielding heroes and red-cheeked small-eyed heroines that played in consecutive patterns beneath rusting theater screens — because you were never one for conformity, anyway. You dranks words from both Cao Cao and Marquez your bookshelf was an idyllic pit of green covers against ripples of mahogany — reach in, please, and pull out a green tea-stained copy of Faulkner for me, pages still fresh from 1989 Maoist propaganda pressed between thin ink. If they ever found the algorithm for cultural literacy, you were the first step because on summer days when cement melted off of soymilk stands you brought in sea cucumbers from Hangzhou. My mother longed to feel their corrugated sides rough against her tongue, pliant bodies crunching beneath enamel  — you were ever the scholar, the informed connoisseur of the century, spoiling her and her siblings by dumping coated hawthorne tarts into shaking hands. Lao Ye, perhaps we were made, meant to sing songs of Whitman while seated on willowing park benches, or perhaps I was born into the wrong time and I should have been there in 1967, corduroy pants dangling on dusty windowsills listening to the scratch scratch scratches of the three characters in your name against the whiteboard  — we could have laughed about Marquez and Cao Cao and Faulkner, bubbles of pretension popping between our gums. Yet perhaps fate never miscalculated, never missed the bullseye for this particular case, because I wouldn’t allow you to drop hawthorne into my grubby palms, no, wouldn’t let you write books that you never finished, and I would never panic the way you did when you found out Lao Lao tossed your sea cucumbers into her porridge stew.

[hyacinthswithbiscuits]

My classmates build creatures Out of green purple threads Strung together like spilling gel pens Nauseous smells of printer ink and binary

[hyacinthswithbiscuits]

Confluence

Tang dynasty poems are twenty lines each, breaks between cadences each character a curve, an iron hook, slicing black scissor slashes against textbook paper. I am no Li Bai, for instead of wine I drink the Law of Conservation of Mass, and I pass time under the home screen of a Nokia rather than moonlight, the foot of my bed nothing more than a scuffing of crushed cockroaches. That night I recite stanzas in my sleep their four beat jumping voices buzzing like dragonflies in my ears. They speak of rivers looping around islands, yellow brown mud sloshing behind rocks the shape of warriors who jumped across gorges in pursuit of wild tigers. I do not need blankets when I have the cadaver arms of Su Song the lisping voice of Wang Bo to sing me to sleep. I press knees against littered plastic bags and feel them crunch like cockroaches under bare feet, and for a minute, I pretend I am standing at the edge of the river, one toe in the flowing mud, my arm resting against the sandbanks, grains of dirt in my nails.

[hyacinthswithbiscuits]

I would like to tell you that your bathroom mirror has stains shaped like Venice dips of toothpaste caked against the strata of fresh glass, piling like stalactites in mineral mines over the coal-black outline of rough washcloths. Your shampoo is basil and Aspirin minced into herbal spiciness so hot it burns scalps and sears patches of skin under my knees; your splinter brown floorboards warm chili peppers, yellow like Cuban mangoes dipped in hummus; your sofa pillows faded pink with the suns of failed garage sales saturated with the hot breath of secrets passed under midnight comforters; your house is the supply closet for an Italian restaurant, family-run.

[hyacinthswithbiscuits]

Monotony

I’m the Jordan Baker of lifestyles small towns too quiet four dry-cleaners, two bookstores broken fountain with a chipped Apollo dancing beneath the fins of fishes, half their scales missing, a semicircle of mundanity. I prefer large towns, metropolis of infrastructure weaving its arachnid legs across boroughs tainted sky-gray with crime and capital punishment. Flushing, Pudong, come and spin your web of translucent horror around a fragile human neck, and I will gladly tie a noose of silk around my collarbone, wrapped tightly three times, taking in the thick scent of proteins and incessant nightlife one ear pressed against my pillow fingers drumming out the heartbeat of rumbling trucks and the clicks of women’s stilettos.

[hyacinthswithbiscuits]

Morning Routine, circa 2013

1. Sneakers in darkness smell like warm perspiration heated coal on top of rotting laundry (5:45 am is not the best time for ocular sensitivity) sounds of backs snapping eyes rubbing flecks of dry skin dropping onto dorm room floors because what kind of self-respecting girl doesn’t love herself a whistle in the ear shrill chirp of the ugly morning lark ringing against small hairs.

2. The bathroom sink is oil ghastly orange from a cracked chili jar, fried contents, miniscules rafts of red crimson vermillion floating into the Bermuda Triangle of the sink basin.

3. Terri (four bunks to the right, the one with the glowing paper stars) jabs my waist as I’m brushing my teeth. “Don’t make him come and yell at you again.”

4. “I don’t want to go running.”

5. I see the girls in the international program yell at the teachers in loud Korean pursing lips violently in adamant refusal, and I feel Othello’s green-eyed beast of jealousy churn in my stomach.

6. Beijing in the winter is ice upon cement so clear and brown I can’t tell which is which under the hood of my school uniform.

7. I’m twenty paces and four long strides behind, “Hurry up, Mei Guo.”

8. I don’t want to go running.

9. The track is covered with black iced asphalt that bleeds my fingers and scuffs my shoes until they’re light aryan blue drumbeats of pounding boots and swishing sweatpants panting around.

10. I can’t use the “time of the month” excuse this time, because I did that only a week ago and my lao shi is running out of patience.

11. I like to think of it as a pedaling a bicycle up a hill albeit one that only slopes upwards sisyphean, isn’t it?

12. I would also like to think that at least I get to see the sunrise so early but the smog is thick and the trees tall and the sky doesn’t change.

13. Sometimes I don’t feel like running at all.

[hyacinthswithbiscuits]

Paint

The sound of cadmium yellow splotching into red thick velcro plops, ringing with turpentine oil is music to my palette.

[hyacinthswithbiscuits]

Bang

I have never seen it, only heard its big silver yawn, fat

microwave belly waving at sweating joggers, single horn head penetrating suburban terraces. Is that you, gray dog, with static fur

as tall as corn mazes, stroked for decades by blue-gloved Germans, hair splattered with incogruous patterns of titanium white  —

Pollock’s forgotten masterpiece? Is it your steel smile teeth rotting of wires and binary grinning from behind high school bleachers? You see me when I can’t see you, I know, silent fingers of radiating bliss lurking under the windows of McMansions and middle-aged mothers who walk brown-haired cocker spaniels, elephant-grey pompadour hiding across the blinking harbor. Perhaps we are not so different, you and I, your mocking waves, your eternal fizz of laughter, for we dream the same dream of violet oblivion, nebulae melting in latte cups, beginnings as big  as the end.