These are ribbons flapping around us, bright ribbons,
every color, some that she has to tell me because I am
blind to color at the worst times, buying socks or guessing
what she is feeling when her face turns from pale yellow
to disappointment, to fear, wound in the streams of fabric
that give darkness light…
we count the windows that count us…
until there is nothing to see, and we sink down into the white
napkins on the backs of the seats, the tiny televisions next
to the driver.
I am Chinese in the mirror
Chinese is an endless space in time
where Chinese is what I cannot
Be.
In one window among the thousands I see the faces
of the uncle who betrayed me, the done thing that made
me a child inside a man, stuck in the claws of incest,
in the one window, the way to a scream that jacks open
my mouth but holds sound hostage, the dry tears of silence
like veins cut open where no blood dares flow, this currency
that paid for my tickets, led me in suspension to fly into
the future and live here a day ahead of what happened
to me when I was too young to know treason.
I am Chinese in the mirror
Chinese is an endless space in time–
I have come here to be what I cannot be.
