GRACE SHUYI LIEW

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE DURATIONAL, NOT ETERNAL?

In this state, my opacity blooms
like wrong
soap
frothing out of a
dishwasher. White foam coats
my dreams
of fascism, alien abductions, and anywhere
but home

The video games I prescribe myself click
and lock me
into place:

I’m on a quest for a specific wild berry bush
I’m getting attacked by mutated wolves
I’m entering tunnels littered with gems
I’m looting corpses

I’m hearing voices. 

I have since moved from a house by the train tracks to
another house
by another train tracks. Every
night the train horn wakes me at
    6am;
    5am;
    3am;

tricks me
into believing the earth
is shattering from its
core
& I wish only
for this resounding
ache to carry
on in silence
instead

I wish the train
would blow up or
roll off its rails
I can’t be loud
when Asian porn is still
a consumer category,
milk-white skin like
a reverse oil spill
I survey the situation.
Accident, or pillaging
Asian women

headlining all these
forward-thinking
genres, artificially
intelligent but lonely
& fixated
at simulation.
Our assigned
database of
gloom always comes
true. Our worries
nothing
but sincere. All our
automatic and negative
thoughts pass
the Turing test,
our joie
de vivre is
embedded
into code—a
lifelong hunt for
one family of origin:
itchy crotches,
curdled balls,
sexual services on

a fevered train,
back of an oxcart,
rickshaw to the middle
of nowhere, slipping
from age to age
in perpetuity
always hovering
at the outskirts
of a grand
unifying theory

There’s an old desk in my bedroom I like to hide under
when I drift too far from my familiar horrors.
Find me there as a child,
dough-like and ready to rise
into shape for anyone who arrives with a threat
to take my life
if I don’t go dead like a scare
crow. Upright and flaring
after the last crow
has fled my owner enters and coos:
Where is my little rainbow hiding this time?
Her taunts scrape
the undersides of my ache. I talk
wild shit to get dragged out
am made to squat in wait then forbidden
to touch myself. Still I do because I want
a beating, want to welt
backward into small openings asking
to be filled. I am asking for it when
my personal God wields a belt
like mama did. At what age do we
talk to our children about when
to fuck, why to take chances, and how to
outlive love? Who encoded the planned
obsolescence of an emotion?
I want her to never
stop. I am nine and high
out of my mind, wigged out on begging
for more or maybe I am seven and
about to be killed, or I am already
buried at twenty-
eight and cannot discern
the outlines of my cadaver oozing into earth,
nothing
if not a raw nerve ready
to graft onto anyone who comes
for me in a fury. Where my body ends and where
mama’s begins
lies the rape that had
no space to exist. When I grow up I want
a fantasy. I reenact rape fairytales
with white lovers, all of whom
insist on hating Trump
while they fuck me—their rage
about The Administration dignifies
into a hard-on slinging
for my civic rights. Why so angry?
I ask. Blowjobs don’t cost much
more than falling
in love with anyone
who expresses outrage on my behalf—
always when I lift my shirt to reveal
my private galaxy of
bruises
they all cum immediately

(This glow is not unnatural.
It’s a dispersal happening at some
indeterminable decay rate—have you ever
seen the sun at dusk crowning a lighthouse?
Call it a trace glimmer but it will set too and
that’s when all platitudes go dark)

I learned of a courageous girl ready to jump off a cliff

Sitting on a rock ledge, she chatted for hours
with those pulling for her when someone said,
think of your mother. That edict gave her the
sincerity to finally push herself into thin air

We learn bodily ire from our mothers—how to run
out of our own flesh—

EVENTUALLY EVERY COLOR CAREENS INTO ITS OWN LACK

In a hard-hearted era flood lights have replaced human observation.
See white widen. See difficulty describing architecture by geometry.
When revolving doors halt their spinning, it’s the shifting lines that vex,
until every movement approaches music & no one remembers stopping.

Anger is never private. It resides directly above every common pulse
so that those who keep their eyes trained on clouds slowly lose their rage.
Even in old age our darkened hair only approximates lightness,
never fully lifting against the iron pull of bright fade.

If we refuse white space as instituted home, only to hear repudiations
fall like darkness, if we refuse to recognize our derived selves
& prefer instead the kind of beauty that will never absolve
meaning, if we keep gunning for what cannot bring change—

Will the pull of rage be gentle the way we tread above other people’s heads
in an upstairs apartment? This is how lonesomeness paces its strides,
equipped by quiet. Even if we slip back down to earth our tiptoes will
never regain the dexterity for sliding heavy things in the dead night again.

IN EVENT OF A PLUNGE, GIVE OVER TO YOUR BODY

Two days after we came home

with a bitter pineapple

I dreamed you    scooped out its black

eyes one by one      threw out the

core  

black eyes but where

     did the black

     eyes go

& we sucked on

  one sweeter end

I can’t bear your sour

green in my gums     rescue me this acrid shear

me  shear me

    shear

    me shear

    heat of stricken   tongue  

               ohgodyesing

    into double-eyed glaze

I keep waking keep turning

turn over to catch your spit’s        arc

a heart can tube out to fit a cylinder if a heart

      can lengthen why be happy when you can be

      normal 

this is all practice    anticipate

     a fresh

    -born face turned

    up with want

you want me caught cheating

          want me

grating bent asking    want

me contemptible you

    want me when I close 

    my eyes   everything resumes its original

form     the pineapple watches

from the windowsill, whole & unsliced

& thrilled

by this brown winter

where nothing ever

happens

as if frozen

in time

      you only love me when I

deargodhelp

Grace Shuyi Liew's first collection of poetry, Careen, is freshly out this April 2019 from Noemi Press. These poems here are an excerpt from the book.

Grace's work has appeared in West Branch, Black Warrior Review, Kenyon Review, cream city review, and elsewhere. She is a Watering Hole fellow, and her other honors include the Lucille Clifton Poetry Fellowship from Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Aspen Summer Words scholarship, resident writer at Can Serrat in Barcelona, resident at Agora Affect, and others. Grace is a Contributing Editor for Waxwing. Born and raised in Malaysia, a former colony of The British Empire, Grace thinks closely of migration, sexuality, violence, and nation states. The Mother figure, the Mother tongue, and the Mother land converge in her work, alongside theories about split consciousnesses and their affect. Currently, she lives in New York, where she runs a burgeoning qpoc arts collective, teaches, and works on a novel. Find more at www.graceungrateful.com.