Not From, But Of

Before the question finishes its own mouth,

I have already swallowed the answer,

a bone I learned to keep

between my teeth.

On the train, a grandmother folds her grandchild

into the hollow of her shoulder.

I am fifteen, starched in my middle-school pinafore,

the same one she pleated for a daughter

thirty autumns past.

But my skin is light sieved through a window screen,

motes adrift,

and hers is the milk-glaze of a teacup

held too long in the hand.

In the market, the fishmonger's tongue

pivots mid-air, a door swinging shut

before I can knock.

这个多少钱? I ask.

He blinks twice, then praises

the foreigner's accent

as though I had learned a dead language

from a book.

I knew baba before father,

knead before bread.

My mouth is a drawer that opens

to the wrong key every time.

International school,

a map without borders.

Korean, American, German, Russian, Taiwanese,

inside the fence, our accents dissolve

into the same cafeteria steam.

Outside, I am a dialect

someone forgot to name.

Where are you from?

这里, I say.

No, where are you from?

They scrape the word like a rind,

wanting the country underneath.

Summer deepens my skin

like wood left in rain.

My grandmother's sigh is a needle.

So black now.

A warning dressed as love,

stay inside, stay pale, stay legible.

The next noon,

I lie on the lawn like a question

refusing its answer.

I am not the soil's first cry.

I am the graft

that took.

I know which dumpling stall

steams its vinegar just so,

how sycamore leaves

turn their palms up to July,

the seam in the Forbidden City's wall

where tourists never look.

Still, they ask when I landed.

I am not the marginalia.

Not the ghost-ink

between translated lines.

I am the spine

the book opens to.

————————————————

Translations:

这个多少钱?: How much is this?

这里: Here

新疆

1. Xīn (新) Adjective Meaning: new

The wind forgets yesterday's sand.

It sculpts dunes into amber waves,

each sunrise a first sunrise,

molten ore over Tianshan,

snow igniting to pink flame.

The air tastes of quartz and beginning.

Time carves canyons, then forgets,

leaving only raw possibility.

Roasting cumin from a morning stall

promises a day not yet lived,

whispered in sun and stone.

2.Jiāng (疆) Noun Meaning: Border, frontier, boundary

But newness is tethered to dust,

history breathing through the wind.

Frontier is not a line but a space

where earth stretches its bones.

Taklamakan sighs. Watchtowers crumble,

their stones warm from forgotten suns.

The Pamirs cast shadows of ice,

wind carrying a dozen tongues.

I stand at the edge,

not an ending but a threshold.

The horizon is not a limit.

It is a question.

I am the figure on horseback,

small against the immense,

waiting.