I.
and then, with shivering asphalt, the black
washes into neptune blue, stars pitching themselves
into the city. In my dreams, I can never
hear the wind —
just the occasional leather-tongued clarinets,
their voices snaking through dreamscape trees,
the stove humming as I prepare mung bean soup
late at night, the taste of two o’clock wistfulness.
Years ago in childhood, I feared death would drive
her way into your lungs or heart any minute. Instead
you took death by the neck and held her,
cleaning dishes while my mother took classes
at the community college, roping your way over
on the laundry line of dusk to shoo the dark away
from the corners of the kitchen, the rims
of my uncratered mind. As if you could drink
moonlight, almond-rinsed, and spread it through
the house with a flick of a hand towel. Sometimes
I ask God to lace my sleep with you: bullet-eyed,
nocturne-lipped, fingers lighting up dry night
like burning saints. But in this sleep, I sink fast
without asking. Into this sotto voce breath,
I resign. In this dream, I don’t need to hear your voice —
only see that it is more likely you stirring
the mung bean soup and kissing me gently
as the tremor of the metropolis beneath us settles
and into the bruised city you depart.
II.
Though your language was a music box I could never crack open
and mine one you couldn’t even touch. It was near the end
when I came across two photos of you young: at a piano bench,
poised — then hugging the old golden retriever, your lips
red-ribbed, your eyes sentries. Could, for once, grandmother
not mean gab and granddaughter not mean growing up
indefinitely, just until I found a way to let go of this year’s
liquored autumn. Could I have scraped out my broken Chinese phrases
when you asked about school because I knew whatever
I said you would have taken home by the neck and held
in the hours until you slept. Yesterday I found you
lying in bed on your back, stone-stomached and beached.
I latch on to these pieces of you. The flavors of glass noodles
and all the words I’ve ever said. The old Honda
you drove me home in that is now mine, the purple hair tie
you always brought to lunch for me, to pull out of your purse
when my hair fell too close to my plate. At some point
I stopped giving it back. Now I use it to string up
the wax moon that insists on slipping down my bedroom walls,
skin crumpling as easily as my own.
III.
8:40 p.m. The backyard’s resident frogs shoot
their voices into the stewing dark. I have started
washing dinner’s dishes, green liquid soap foaming
into bubbles, chopsticks clacking as I rub them
between my hands like a prayer. Maybe when you go
you will sing among the frogs in their evening spectacular,
present your favorite Chinese song in the courts
of the cricket king. Maybe you will retire to your bedchambers
in the alcove of the moon. Maybe you will still drive
the dark away from the kitchen corners, infuse the air
with the almond light of the moon, speak softly
as you lead me to bed on August nights and I fall asleep,
dreaming of a blue city train track that doesn’t end. And I
will try to unbind my Chinese so I may send you off
with mung bean soup, a coat for the road
and a kiss, a poem that is ready and ripe.
__________
Esther Sun is a Chinese-American writer from the Silicon Valley in Northern California. Her poems have been recognized by the National YoungArts Foundation and the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers, and they are forthcoming from or have appeared in Vagabond City, Euphony Journal, Élan, and Blue Marble Review. Esther is a 2020 American Voices Nominee for the Bay Area Writing Region.