If Writing Is Remembering
BY YUXI LIN
The trick is to go backwards.
Then to keep going.
Time speeds up. A door shuts
& opens. I come home every day.
Sounds of laughter flood down
my parents’ mouths. The sun
sinks. My mother lies awake.
My father opens his eyes & rolls
toward her. Night after night
they climb out of bed & into
the same lives. Before they fight
they say sorry so am I sorry.
On a black & white screen
I lose my heartbeat & shrink to darkness.
A sperm tears itself from the egg.
She is beautiful. He is skinny.
They are a woman & a man holding
a photo of themselves.
In a red hall my father lets fall
my mother’s veil. The trumpet stops,
then the cymbals. Tongues slide
back inside their own mouths.
My mother pedals counterclockwise
on a yellow bike & unspools her life.
They have never made each other cry.
He is with another woman.
She loves another man.
They twine their limbs around
other people & break promises.
Summer comes, then comes again.
The past is perfect & alive.
Self Portrait as Hermaphroditos
BY YUXI LIN
I was born of beauty,
the dirty kind. I sleep
facing the wall. You will
want to touch me.
Don’t.
I will want to want it.
Won’t.
I had a boy in me,
who fed outside & cut
children like weeds, who
wandered home
& folded himself into
softness. That was the way
for most girls.
One day the boys who killed
the girls inside them
smeared mud
over my chest & shouted —
Are you a girl?
Are you a girl?
Yes.
Prove it! They screamed.
I made the boy in me
mount the girl & crush her
to an it. In a circle
the girls watched excitedly
who had silenced the boys
inside them. Together
we said nothing.
Years later a man pinned me
down. I called out
to the boy & girl
but could not recall
their names. In the night
no one & nothing came
except harm, with its familiar,
practiced gait.
Lie
BY YUXI LIN
Poem beginning with a line from Danez Smith
The bed where it happened is where I sleep.
Firm queen, 60 X 80, designed for two bodies,
& the saying — Now you must lie in it.
The man I loved loved to tell lies, though
he was honest when he punished me.
For months, I let him.
But I am lying. I say bed because it implies
comfort. It happened on the couch, maybe.
Something cold even in summer.
What do I remember of the man I lay with?
His right eye — the one I could see,
burning like a cigarette.
Must I lie still for the scene to end?
I wanted it, I tell myself, & it’s true
that I wanted to want it.
The lie held me & the ones before me
as I waited for pain to stop changing.
The lie was necessary —
You see? I am ready to believe
I am a thing worth saving.
