letter from brother: stargazing, persimmon

stargazer x describing things by what they are not—

my brother writes to me

and in his letter tells me about stargazers,

which get their name from burying themselves

in sand. when they look up to capture

their prayer, it looks like they are gazing

at stars. i think that’s pretty poetic, so instead

of writing about the deaths and the dry, bloodless

nights, i will talk about the stars juicing

the universe’s sorrow, filling moon craters with it like champagne.

i will not talk about the diseases of my father,

of my father’s father, won’t talk about what soon may be

mine, nor the gnawing hunger, nor

the anger. instead, i will remain in this ignorance—

where everything is a little beautiful and if not, at least

poetic. i won’t talk about my mother, who departs

in ecstatic sob, won’t emphasize the beauty

of spiderwebs, which glow hungrily in the night

like the skeleton of a bloodless moon. i myself am a crime,

a body filled with lies of omission. when

nights arrive and the stars dim

we bow our heads—not in defeat, but in hunger.

if i am anything, i am a body at the intersection

of beautiful and sickly. my brother,

he writes to me and it is beautiful.

*          *          *

hunger—

i am not hungry; i watch as the vitreous body

of a whole fish mists and clouds

into opacity, into the past. i watch slivers

of ginger falling onto the cutting board like strands

of a girl’s golden hair. 水煮鱼. my mother

faithfully tends, washes the ripe persimmon, plump

with juice. we gather: my mother, father,

brother, sister, thin slivers of green, of meat.

afterwards, my sister holds her hair over the toilet,

unravels in shades less poetic. i am thinking of

blonder hair, bluer, bigger eyes, smaller waists, whiter smiles.

healthy girls, healthy mothers, healthy fathers.

i am not hungry.