laflaneur's profile

From where I stand it is obvious like plastic chopsticks, like you and me laughing, wonton soup up our noses. I say, I am going to China, and you say, That's fantastic, now I will know someone who has gone to China. Write me, I say. No computer? Not in China. A lie. But I want you to crinkle and uncrinkle the first letter I send you, wherein I will fall in love with a man named Wan-xu and you will imagine me whispering Wonshu, wonshu which is just wrong, which is frankly insulting. You know, ...

Mandarin From where I stand it is obvious like yellow polka dots, like you and me laughing, chocolate milk up our noses. I say, I am going to China, and you say, That's fantastic, now I will know someone who has gone to China. When I imagined this scene I was wearing silk and smelled of begonias and you were some kind of sheik, a trader, unafraid of distances. Write me, I say. No computer? Not in China. A lie. But I want you to crinkle and uncrinkle the first letter I send you, wherein I will...

How are we the same? To my tapioca, you are glass: jagged and without imperfections. Far away, you glitter. This, Einstein, is relativity: I forget your life, and you are allergic to my implications. At the city’s edge, where white becomes gray, a boy loses his fire truck to the other side of a chain-link fence. Those five inches are a thousand miles. His mother whispers: Chains, my child, are nothing. Reach through: you are small enough. She should know. Five years ago, she was discarded, an...

Small places call up thoughts of home: quilts in dark corners, the lamp-lit solitude of night. Such walls cannot restrain, but follow like a mother, a quiet fortress glowing within. My prisons are instead the frail cold shadows which at times cling to my very skin and in others seem to fill the lonely world. I trail a burdened chain in rattling flight from a million watchful eyes that roam like willing ghosts: the soldier’s choking hands, a pair of sky-bound streamers weakly curled, two white...

They say her mother did not cry or light candles but merely sold the house and left with one remaining daughter. The school paper prints her obituary on the sports page, and someone observes the same day took ten other lives in clean white rooms. Strangers driving past that spot hardly note the sudden flowers around the bend, but on clear nights a few form circles where the wreckage has been cleared away. They sing and hold hands as if to be a halo around her sainted life.