constant flux

constant flux

you met her yesterday when you were both cornered/ cornered by the mundanity of foul existence & the incessant chatter of a tsingtao-chugging-son-of-a-bitch roommate into the rickety aluminum stool at the bar counter/ driftwood discarded from the other side of the ocean/washed ashore with maroon-and-satin dress plastered to hips/depending on the person she could be Jonah in the whale or Chang’e on the moon with /those billowing obsidian-shine strands draping across protruding shoulders/ hell, obsidian shine like the friction-burned tires of souped-up Miatas that you scrubbed for hours on weekdays at the San Marcos Shell– but put that shit to rest/you came for the beer in the glass  & not/your own hazy reflection at the bottom of it/ five shots; enough to forget your english name and keep your /chinese one but /four will suffice to make the bus ride back a little shorter/ with Baby Keem roaring in deaf ears/ with knuckles on plastic ridge/with her palms pressed to the window beside you/and you are not/sure how it happens but with a trading of/ forgotten sentences and the knowledge of each’s palms/and perhaps the protein /gossamer of sickly lips/ you both enter 293 Valencia through two doors and end up in/the same room; your roommate is still out but it goes unspoken, there is no sex expected/where change is a euphemism for pain. only words on lip, only obligations where/ once, she begins, nu wa lived in a/ shanghai flat/ a computer scientist & had a ponytail & glasses/ whispering c-plus-plus into wukong’s ear to etch programs in mud/but over time she became interested in the literature of the mud-figures  she created and came down into the dirt on a 747 to/be among them and the patch of dirt that she landed on was called california / scratching ethereal figures in the squalor with toyota-wheels/ but her sperm-bank and egg-carrier grew stark/ in their fury and reached across/the ocean through phone-screens and concrete hands in the sun/ sweeping away all that was good/and in the golden rubble she/ found fucking san marcos where her eyes bathe fluorescent in the glaze of creme-brulee, leftovers from three days prior that a broiler couldn’t even save/ where the hands of a stranger rest on her half-crescent shoulders & the half-congealed vermillion of her /tears– god-fucking-dammit, too many things are halved/ a package of shabu beef at HMart half-off that you still can’t afford/ a sheaf of papers on the wire-rack, two days late to Prof. Kearny, half-credit despite your protests/ fuck your father’s musings, cao, if you could ever be half the student your sister was/ Kearny said the abysmal midterm grade was a result of  ‘death by a thousand papercuts’, no, professor, these are nails/ no, mother, I don’t resent you but I refuse to see you/no–  she can’t stay, she has a/train in the morning/and it seems that the only thing permanent in the room is the table; even time is an anachronism/the door closes and you/struggle to remember her

name/ oh, what are men and women/folding through seams of fingers & kitchen blinds, gone in the

constant flux?

wukong- Sun Wukong, the Monkey King

nu wa- in Chinese mythology, the goddess that created humanity

cao- expletive, dammit; fuck