Landscape with the Night
BY AIDEN HEUNG
I was left behind, a bent nail rusting
in the gutter. All the important people
had driven away in their expensive cars.
It was easier not to chase the next—
the next bus, the next village, the next self
to lose in the shimmer of another promise.
My hands held what I owned: a sales kit
of well-treated bricks; its black leather
bit into my palm. In my palm sweat
hungered for more sweat. 2022, East China,
I was young, I had a body to trade.
I had on a suit bigger than myself.
Gray-haired workers
sat at the curbs, smoked, shoes glued
to the bitumen road, their eyes like fingers
thumbing my face. They didn’t know I wore
their skin. In the air the rotten scent
of a long summer. I could feel
the dandruff in my hair. Evening began
to tease me with the weight of a pillow.
No motels in sight. I stood at a streetlamp,
waited for its russet glow to wash over me.
The factory, a throne against the encroaching dark.
I offered all I had—
The light came on. I reached out my hand,
wet and callused. A statue, throat full of ash.
Landscape with a Lost Coat
BY AIDEN HEUNG
I counted three months, a clock’s slow
blade, before a plane would take me
to another shore.
I was a salesman, I knew
how to dress to impress.
That day I wanted to impress him,
the seaside-town Van Gogh.
He called me brother. We were
the same age.
A thin mechanic, he knew
how to blend colors in a machine,
his clothes coated with polyester,
mica, and wax.
I liked his veiny hands.
By the pretreatment trough,
I was thinking of a poem,
the summer I wished you loved me
enough to kill me…
Hands still on the gauge,
he turned to me,
his face sharp in the smog.
I felt a rock falling through
the thin skin I called my body.
That night, arm on my shoulder,
mouth to my ear, he was all
the sounds in my arteries. I could swallow
the battered moon in his hair.
He moaned
words he would soon forget.
Later, I went out to the beach, alone.
The sea gnarled in dark. A lighthouse
looked with its astonished eye.
I lost my coat.
The next day I bought him breakfast:
soy milk, a bowl of congee.
With a line from Richie Hofmann
