Tainan Nocturne

Already the river

elides its distance, bruised

as blackened sinews thinning

at the banks’ vanishing point,

where the horizon cuts

a white vertex.

Ye Ye might die tonight,

but I’m more troubled

by the mosquitoes leaving

flat red stones on the back

of my neck, by the family

whose bus blew up

in Xinhua street & killed

all four of them. Afterward

the vehicle’s metal skeleton

peeled apart

like the immolating black wings

of a moth: a gambit,

I assume, all travelers take.

What is the risk

of carrying something foreign

within you, the neon-

shot Hiragana & Roman characters,

proxy rivers where the living

contest the dead, contest dying

& the lighthouse eye slices

a white razor through the ocean

as if to contest its nativity—

I admit, I lack the courage

to resolve myself. Why else

let these helpless hands

pick at the wooden balustrade

while one dim street over

in the building behind me,

the night is falling

on my grandfather’s life.

All the mosquitoes I’ve killed

sink into clouds of algae

& beer glasses, they tug

against the river rock,

some difficult grammar. 菡馨,

the dead are more virtuous than us,

slackened jaws divulging

soil & tooth. Every soft nothingness.

Across blood and land:

a consciousness is not a place of stasis

but rather the travel

from being to non-being.

No different than the last foreign

light pinned to my face.

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