Air

Like every night, the windows are blacked out. Snippets, mere slivers of light invite whistling then silence and stilled breathing, then the end of silence and the end of breathing, for some. Others will scream into the void, into the brick returned to dust and mounds.

Black is safest, but it’s not really black: the moon still shines, starlight twinkles, and from heaven the bombers can see silhouettes like in a child’s school performance in a darkened theater: enough to illuminate the crouching figures, enough to see what waits.

Pass the popcorn (there is no popcorn). Turn on the light (for god’s sake don’t turn on the light! Can’t you hear the engines’ whine?) Momma I’m scared (hush, hush baby, it’ll be all right.) You want to breathe again but the pilots might hear you. You want to breath again but closing your eyes is like a bear hugging you too tightly, it’s like that time in the swimming pool you got held under the water and fear ripped out your heart and you wanted to breath, anything, open your mouth and suck in water just to fill your lungs with something besides fear but it’s still dark. And the planes are still overhead. And you want to check the corners of the window to make sure no light can escape, like picking a scab – it won’t change anything for the better.

Time doesn’t pass with the sweep of a second hand. It doesn’t freeze like the top of a swing’s arc, the moment you leap into the void, and you see how the nearby tree limbs sieve light through dust, how the baby’s red hat sticks to her head, how far away lies the earth, how your heart is overhead until all at once gravity reaffirms her smooth embrace and your feet ache to find the ground, and laughing you land and roll and sound re-emerges from your ears.

It’s over. The all-clear sounds.

How do they know, Momma? What, baby, know what? To sound the sirens. How do they know it’s safe?

(Fill in the blank)

I want to dig
words from the blank earth
with my two hands
plunge into hearty loam
trade places
earthy loam
rich, ready to grow
Jax' beanstalk to the giant sky.

Someone said it's a gift
making words like a mental assembly line
like a factory wordker
canned laughs and empty boxes
waiting to be filled with hope.

That's what these words are:
hope. They're like sticks
you gather in the lee of tall trees
the fingers they shed when the world grew too heavy
to support new growth
and so you fetch them
bits of kindling to announce your pending fire
sometimes sputtering, smoky, timid
until your heart catches
and it burns up
love leaving like a smoke offering
to the silent muse whose outline
you can just, almost, make out in the haze.

When the flames douse themselves
when the words become ash
and cover up your heart
that's when I'll dig
with a spoon if necessary
water it with whatever I can find (you fill in the blank)
and wait.

Smoke becomes earth, eventually, doesn't it?
You fill in the blank.

Fathom

You don't say
anything
I can hear.
The window is closed
and rain falls like books from shelves
in an earthquake: I read
into each flat splat
as though the sound left
a hole too deep to fathom.

I don't even know what that means.
Do you?
I'd ask
but you don't hear anything I can say
the hole is too deep to hear
anything from the bottom
so every rain drop that ever lived
could pour in and pour in and pour in
never filling it
we could read about it in books
the forever rain in the bottomless hole
like love
unrequited.

Draws

While she draws
blood, hold
his head still.

Clenched fist averted
eyes breathing
shallow as a puddle

the sinuous red line slurps
and he can't turn away
from the two vials

until like a magician pulling the tablecloth
she slips the needle out
replacing it with cotton

he can't hold
on anymore
before the trash can

the floor accepts his stomach
in little bits and a torrent.
Later he asks, why was it white

I only drank water?
It must have been the bagel I say.
Oh, like paste, he replies.

But I won't eat that
laughing a bit.
Wipe my chin, Dad.

Lang's nose and upper lip are raw
where the floor punched him
after fainting.

If I don't like this
that quivering lip and quaking voice
telling the doctor about tunnel vision

knowing he would soon pass out
trying to kneel
so he wouldn't be hurt falling

before he woke, cheek to tile
I like this:
after I put out two tupperware tubs

to catch any more barf
he looks up from his pillow
commenting, I just thought of a gameshow:

Pick Two Tubs of Puke
and gently chuckling to himself and me
he gives up

to sleep

Brown haired ghost

Chatter and laughter: the fall of evening and the ascent of night. Mirth mingles well with bright lights: all those shiny faces and gleaming teeth and the pulse of conversation supporting crescendos, between sips or swigs.

The baby bounced with her amah after grandfather had doted: he rolled her feet like soft dough gently in the long fingers of his two hands and blew kisses onto the pink nubs, quite unseemly for a man of his station. He smiled. Jean beamed in reply, if her sisters-in-law froze their faces.

Candles dotted the sideboards and the mantle blazed; the chandelier blossomed like white fuchsia. Ice clinked. Heels clicked on teak. The windows reflected rivers of red, a blue chiffon torrent, an ache of frost frocks against arch black suits.

Whispers sound the same in every tongue.

Drinks were trimmed and replenished as if by magic, the night was magic, the din was only voices and yet the murmur kept the march of war at bay.

Joe kept council in the sitting room with old school chums and the lieutenants. His narrow face and sharp chin jutted like a single large tooth from beneath his straight, black, parted-in-the-center hair. Jean could see when Joe reached into his vest pocket for the silver cigarette case. He always held it in his left hand, clicked the clasp open with right, and slid out the white stick in a quick, fluid motion. She loved his hands. He’d snap shut the lid, tap the cigarette once twice, hold, once more, then place it between his dark-ruby lips, while in a single motion replace the case in his pocket and pull out a packet of matches. Flare; inhale and brightening ember; flick out the flame – what to do with the spent match? Jean watched Joe’s head swivel and glance land on the tray of a nearby server; he motioned him over and exchanged a snifter for the extinguished match. He saw her looking, held her gaze for a long second, then returned to his companions. Jean wasn’t quite sure if he smiled at her, or as he turned away.

She stood out. The white ghost, dark brunette hair, the American girl. Joe’s bride. They all spoke with British accents when she stood with them; her English was flat Philly, with drawn-out “o’s” and “ewe’s” and no intonation. Half a pace away, she might only have turned her head, and the conversation might veer suddenly back to Cantonese, quick as a shadow. She wouldn’t understand. Not the slight; not the content. Trilled laughter; Jean’s smile seemed coincidental.

C.T. attracted his own coterie: ministers and their wives, colonels and generals in regalia. None expected him to don traditional garb, a silk robe, ponytail; he did not. His suit was more charcoal than coal, however. His roundish glass frames shined subdued gold beneath his close-cropped pate. He still wore his wedding band, though widowed nearly a decade. His eldest son looked, long face expressionless, across the room at the man who stood conveniently at the center of the glow cast by the chandelier.

He told a joke, evidently: the gathering laughed. Jean, standing nearby, laughed, not overly loudly, but clearly. C.T. stopped and turned to her; suddenly a bubble of silence expanded outwards like an island in the stream of voices that still ran through the room.

Jean became conscious that her father-in-law had inclined his head towards her, eyebrows raised, expectant. “Why do you laugh, daughter?” If his son’s sisters frowned at the familiarity, the possessiveness – the acceptance – no watchers made comment.

“Why, your joke was funny, father.” Jean beamed.

He was still, and a look of amusement crept from his chin, across his expressive mouth, up his cheekbones. It rippled upwards into his eyes and brows and forehead, and he tilted back his head and laughed. “You understand!” It was more a confirmation than a question. “I am delighted!”

It was barely four months since Jean, her baby girl, and her prodigal husband had landed on the eastern shore at Shanghai. Four months of standing in the kitchen with the cooks; trailing them to the market; sitting while they bantered and laughed at the goings-on in the house of the Ambassador’s son, his father the emissary so recently returned from China’s participation in Hitler’s Olympiad. This brown haired ghost who sometimes shared the bed of her husband (when he came home) had sharp ears.

The island sank beneath the waves of sound and laughter; the moment passed. C.T.’s smile remained, however, throughout the night. Color mixed with the hours and alcohol and affixed itself into memory. The brown haired ghost had painted herself into her father-in-law's heart.

Joe kept silent in the sitting room, smoking. He shook off conversation, watching Jean, as she sometimes watched him: as though behind one-way glass. She didn’t turn to look at him the entire time.

It's like this:

It’s like this: Pete will take it. Mom won’t say a thing. You go out, sew all day, have lines in your fingers from where the needles press, a couple of dollars and some dimes and he better not find out you kept a dime for yourself.

Don’t let him kiss you when he leans in. Stand in the doorway, don’t step through and for God’s sake don’t stand with your back against the wall or the icebox or the door. Have air behind you.

Maybe keep your overcoat on, or a sweater, even in the summer.

He’ll smell like onions and garlicky lamb and sour yogurt if you’re lucky. If he smells like beer or it’s after 10 o’clock or the lights are out when you are walking up the sidewalk, I don’t know what to tell you.

Have the cash out, I guess. Don’t make him wait. OK, that’s what. Have the money out.

Get up the stairs and close the door and turn the key. But listen for the door in case I come home later and unlock the door for me when you hear me coming up the steps.

Don’t come out looking if you hear the door but don’t hear me coming up the steps.

Don’t cry, Jeannie. Don’t get that look. I don’t know why Mom… it doesn’t matter, it’s how things are. Come here, hug me. You look nice, honey, when you smile. Try to smile. See? I’m smiling, it helps, doesn’t it?

I think there’s a new movie at the RKO, with Cary Grant. Do you want to see it?

We should go now.

Whistle

You want to learn to whistle.  You’re six.  There’s a bird, the kind that were silent when it was loud with bombs, and then when to make a sound meant the humans could find you to eat you.  Now, the war is over, at least the war against the emperor.  The other war is still marching: there are still soldiers over the hill, or over the next hill.  But still far enough away so that the singing bird makes you want to whistle.

You purse your lips like a duckbill. That doesn’t work. All that happens is a whooshing noise like you’re blowing out a birthday candle (which you won’t see for another three years, but you don’t realize that yet) or rather, just a candle. You hyperventilate trying desperately to make the whistling sound. The bird calls again. It is a mockingbird even if it’s not a mockingbird: the sound stings you.

Light falls between the trees like arrows. Among the trunks other boys play; your older brother is ganged up with the other bigger boys. You are always the Indian. Your younger brother is sitting on the porch, again, wide eyed. You know how to whistle now, remembering that day in Hong Kong when the whateverbird taught you that sound is a choice, even if you don’t yet know how to make it. You learned that you can choose to purse your lips like a duck and someday a bird will fall out, on command.

You have knock knees, skinny thighs, and socks with no elastic. You have hair the color of coal and teeth like full moons. You can trace circles in the dirt with your toe. Like a dancer. Like the dancer you will be someday. You can whistle low, tunelessly, to make yourself happy. All your older brother can do is growl.

“Hey, Frank!” You turn toward the familiar with only the briefest of hesitation. You have come to learn that hesitation equals an arm punch. You don’t want to turn. You know, you can hear the heavy breaths, four or five of them. Joe isn’t in the lead – you can tell he wants to be, but defers to the oldest boy. When no one else is around he is the boss, but has learned to become obsequious and deferential, in a sneering way. “Frank, we’re playing.” It’s not a question, or even a command. It’s just a fact. It was time for you to become the Indian again, to slip among the trees and disappear down dirt paths if you didn’t want to be the bottom cushion to a gaggle of fists. Before they can organize you take off running, dodging in case a rock flitters by like that time two months ago when Joe actually got in trouble when Mom visited, because of the welt and blood on the back of your head. Joe only smiled when you’re in pain, you realize. You hit the treeline 15 yards ahead of the pack and slalom like a rabbit. A laugh escapes and you whistle in bursts, laughing that you can’t whistle. It doesn’t matter what happens next: you’re running and laughing and every so often a bird escapes your mouth into the tiptop leaves, heading for the sun.