Moving fluidly between Hong Kong and the UK, Sarah Howe’s work is transnational in its sensibility, straddling boundaries and occupying several spaces at once. In “Where Is,” Filipino poet Lawdenmarc Decamora takes Howe’s poem “Crossing from Guangdong” as a springboard for another leg of the never-ending journey between places.

Where is

(after Sara Howe’s Crossing from Guangdong)

I don’t see meeting minutes

as                          constantly risking [ik-sahyt-muhnt]

but as Ferlinghetti lines

spreadeagled in lambent

Hong Kong districts      mourning

over our pedestrian lives

once a rice Coney Island

now a model city too busy

w/ parks & painted

dreams & melancholies

bikinied

beliefs long adored for their common language of binaries: eastern

philosophy what a lesson to swallow what coconut meat to

but chew

it’s not bubble gum for sure my dear joe

it’s Peking duck we

suck & spit

then suck again & again like Cantonese in IPA country

swallowing phonemes in all its sweetness

often you think of Disneyland

more often the state economy

showbiz etceteras   commercial spaces   newspapered ideas

cars & telephones

the quantum case of you & me

or mainland king kong TV

however at my most riverine moment

I believe

in my mother

for saying that crossing borders

finds you not a fruit

in the half-light

but makes you

home