called me Fu:

浮 to float, to change, or 付 to pay, to hand over.

Either way, there is a distance crossed.

*

Stars odyssey to us in their bright colours but our eyes see them only in white.

*

Even 福, bringing luck and fortune, crowns portals of small steps, ushering in a new batch of
time.

*

A plane’s wings cut through time, bring me to a country’s citizenship while another briefly fills
my perimeter.

Out the window a true bird’s eye view: only un-vivisected green and blue

water carried in undulating lines, blemished by our shadow.

*

Is a transaction not a wall in space? It must give us permission to move.

*

I order an erhu from China to my doorstep and watch it do what I have done.
If I return it, it can do what I have not.

*

To be floating in the cosmos
of my mother, to be floated down that threshold and punctured
by light, air, a new cosmos too far to drink.

To have the galaxy retreat down an
alley in fear of its own bright.

*

To stitch desire closed: way we draw hearts, way we draw stars to us with our simple strings
making up their shapes
by wishing them closer.

*

The plane makes up the passengers inside:

foreigner threshed from the Canadian. Enter white
cloud, that white forecast eventually

spitting its own self into a new keeper.

*

Last week when I thought you said you were nestless:

liminal, without whisper of home.
Restless: transient and unkept.

I drift without landing. Shift like clouds or nervous hands.

*

I learn scales on the erhu, love the way it weeps a ladder into air,
cries Twinkle Twinkle Little Star to a ceiling, like wishing China into the room.

Like all of us, when it cries it crosses a threshold.

*

We gather clumps of sound and name it, and it is song. Cells are named and human. Land is
named and, once defended, nation.

The naming creates the place and the between, hollows out a berth for our knowing.

*

My birth was a:
place hollow for
naming the between o f knowing

*

The ground might be my last and only keeper. Laid to rest—thus, home

doing the one thing I know to end the distance.

*

We see a cemetery of dead stars in the sky. Those stars do not see us once.

And yet we wish upon them—


附: to be attached. 附近: to be nearby.

blunting Empire ’s sharpest border i can make any boot shine
in moonlight
ode to flowers how rain helps them grow ode to resilience
ode to injustice ode to oppression & being
oppressed sonnet on
warm tomato soup small joys
ladled into beautiful mouths mouths open like
moons
love as full as the moon
mortar shells can
fall like moons
did we ever ask
the moon
if it wants to be in our poems
beautiful moon
beautiful we-
we drown so beautiful die
so beautiful
does the murdered child compel us
if not written well
by well i mean beautiful by which i mean
moonlit poetic how the knife glistens for the birds above
how a drone could be a bird dressed in cloud
love
love love love
love love love love
the soul & all the small joys love
the moon love birds carrying only platitudes
declaring small joys
—
we might starve on small joys & the moon
might not wait to be swallowed by the sun.