Two Poems – Yalobusha Review

CARRY

If there is a plea, there is a white man kneeling, neck exposed to prayer. His hands are folded at his lap. He wants the sounds in his head to inhabit one, two, three, four, … bodies, each a vehement replica of the previous, ad smooth infinitum. He confesses he owns you. Says your tail was molded after the ease of his walk, your reek the breaths he expels.

He instructs you to stretch your arm out ahead of you. He instructs you to slowly bend each finger. He instructs you to watch every quiver. He watches you remember the mark of your own construction, of having been made so.

DISSIMILATION

They grew up sharing
a tail

whose soft unworn end could cut a

sharp line across the
smallest winds.

With the years they fell, tail first

Down a captive country netting loosed faces
Two pairs of hands sewn to two pairs of cheeks

really just another myth-made victim miring
among indigo clouds

another sand angel flailing the white desert

After years, months, days of assurances pouring in
           from all over the realms the sisters
           finally embrace their nationlessness / The crassness of
           discussing nations must have left a mark she and she
           has to bear / on any given face /
           soft addiction hemmed inside
           sworn fantasies

Some have said ashes to white ashes

Some have revealed the realizations of foreign women

The fissured coats she drapes
over
Her sister’s stitched body / billow like weak
Emblems

Before long the sisters learned
the privilege of sucking on a single, lucid name

Mouth on mouth.

Misty vapor
                          gathered around their snaked bodies,
                          snaked tails, the world’s first

Wild blue matrimony. Outwardly,

                          there is nothing
                                  obviously fecund about their tail

        Carrying all the life to come

All the life to be decided

        at a later date or strewn
        the way conscience
        releases itself from bough to
        white bough as a

Wild thing uncoiled

—-

“Carry” and “Dissimilation” are parts of a chapbook that won Ahsahta Press’s 2015 Chapbook Contest, forthcoming soon.

Grace Shuyi Liew’s next project is on spaces. Her work has appeared or will appear elsewhere in PANK, Bone Bouquet, West Branch, Puerto del Sol, Twelfth House, H-ngm-n, and more. She is from Malaysia.