Years ago, they decorated the centennial with bright red chairs, thousands, swimming
in the amphitheater. Beside me, you flip through my Instagram DMs, even though we
have been broken up for a month. I measure the distance between us in parts. Weeks
of parties with American music which we lazily attend. We still both speak English as if
we were in Vancouver. You like secrecy, standing as an outlaw or expat in the ankle-high
riverwater of the nation, so my mundanity salts you, weighs the history of my creation
against the pale blade on your neck. With me, there is always a high horse you can dangle
your feet from. I want to reach for you, but my head is tethered by the distant impression
of a body tugged backward through its Manchu braid. You call me humorless. Waking in 
China in the middle of the night to find all the Ginkgo leaves pressed flat to the earth and
the image is a woman pulled by her hair and printed onto the soil while she is beat to
death. The ease of your body beside mine objective, two pleasant syllables neighbored
in free verse: poems I scribble floating dead on the sink. The nation pulls my feet in
piles of January snow, slowly melting from salt on the road into an uncrossable river.
Your Instagram story is an infinite yellow house of genocide but your profile picture
is a party. I hate to see your face when we both know it is not so maroon before you
drink, drenched in yourself. Ten days ago we flop on your couch and watch Stranger
Things. Ten days ago the massacre has been beginning, and it had already begun when
you pointed the remote at me, when all I could hear was the deep white sink of machete
on this room, this neck. Gingerly, English is passed between clean, open-mouthed actors,
but I stopped listening. So what if we are all actors. We had never been so instinctual,
so verbose. If I could be a house, I would be the one in which a soldier fired into a tub
of rice and blood seeped out because a child hid there. I would be the tub that bleeds
and not the child, the final deception of not-saving. In that life, you would be the hollow
seashell he held to his ear years ago, quietly listening to the entire ocean crash at once.