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They have set aside their black tin boxes, scratched and dented, spattered with drops of pink and blue; and their dried-up, rolled-up tubes of alizarin crimson, chrome green, zinc white, and ultramarine; their vials half full of gold powder; stubs of wax pencils; frayed brushes with tooth-bitten shafts; and have gone in fashion and with grace into the clouds of loose, lush roses, narcissus, pansies, columbine, on teapots, chocolate pots, saucers and cups, the good Haviland dishes spread like a garden on the white lace Sunday cloth, as if their souls were bees and the world had been nothing but flowers.

Welcome to Texas, Devin Johnston, a windmill has your name— stubborn and American at off-rhyme to the arroyo-creased, angular region. Bald, redheaded turkey buzzards eat a rabbit struck by what it only understood as supernatural. The birds bring to mind black grasshoppers that broke clacking into red-winged and rasping darts. And even as we drive secular sunlight polishes aluminum slantwise.

I. The face of Chinatown returns its color, plucked from July's industrial steamer. Dry the cup! So we do. Four noodle shops on East Broadway release their belches collectively. They breed in me a hankering for family life. Here, there's no logic to melons and spring onions exchanging hands. No rhythm to men's briefs clothes-pinned to the fire escape. Retirees beneath the Manhattan Bridge leak hearsay. The woman in Apartment #18 on Bayard washes her feet in pot of boiled water each evening before bedtime. But every handful of weeks she lapses. I lean into the throat of summer. Perched above these streets with whom I share verbs and adjectives. II. Faces knotted, bangs softened with grease. The East River pulls along a thread of sun. While Sunday slides in. Again, in those plain trousers. How the heat is driven off course. How one can make out the clarified vowels of bridges. Who’s keeping count of what’s given against what’s stolen? There's nothing I can't trace back to my coarse immigrant blood. Uncles tipple wine on the streets of Mott and Bayard. Night shifts meet day shifts in passing. Sweat seasons the body that labors. And in each noodle shop, bowls dusted with salt.

Race, friends, is boring.  Everyone says so. Hashtag all lives matter, the channel turns, we ourselves live and turn, and moreover the TV told me yesterday (unendingly) ‘Ever to talk about race means you have no Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no Inner Resources, because all I see is race. People have race, literature has race, especially great literature, Henry has race, with his blacks & whites made up as his feelings about love & sex & art, which have race. And our social ills, & sin, in Chinese drag are somehow a dog that’s eaten itself, & its tail miserably remains as our mirror, bone or breaker, heaving on tide: us, flag.

are real. They jump from roof-top to roof-top, do a backward flip down to the concrete floor and land perfectly on two feet. The metal of swords clang, the body moves with the precision of a praying mantis striking its prey. Their dresses are colorful, long and lacy, billow and flair with each turn and twist. Jewelry in the hair dangles and sparkles. Chinese female kung-fu superheroes are smart, fight bad guys, do good deeds, and risk their lives. They appear when least expected. Chinese female kung-fu superheroes never give up. They travel often alone by foot through mountains. They work hard training to master various martial arts forms. They do not care about Barbies, those plastic dolls of only one hair color that just looked pretty in the 80's. They aren't impressed; they do not want a boring life. Chinese female kung-fu superheroes venture out and save cities against villains. They steal into the night in their black ninja-like suits, soundlessly through a house to recover a magical sword and to release a prisoner, knowing exactly where to press with their two fingertips to freeze the guards and to accomplish their mission. After Jeannine Hall Gailey's

Pull in your feet, little darling, so I can kiss your wee trotters while I fold under a toe and another one underneath. I bend a little piggie. I bend another little piggie And look at that naughty little piggie that is still sticking out. Now, now, my treasure, there is work to be done here. Your toes like fairy thimbles, the blossom of the foxglove. Like a calf that is spancelled or a hobble on a chicken, there will be swaddlings of silk on the feet of my dear. That my daughter now shrieks like a blue jay is no matter, she will sway in the future like a bamboo on a windy day or like a willow sapling. So I bend under the big toe and another toe after to form a foot like a lotus about to unfold. Poor Cliodhna has flat feet. Maire has huge ones. Peggy’s are like spades and Niamh’s like two rakes. Just hold still, my dearie, while I tighten your bindings. I’m only your mammy doing my very best for your sake

The dragon is in the street dancing beneath windows pasted with colored squares, past the man who leans into the phone booth’s red pagoda, past crates of doves and roosters veiled until dawn. Fireworks complicate the streets with sulphur as people exchange gold and silver foil, money to appease ghosts who linger, needy even in death. I am almost invisible. Hands could pass through me effortlessly. This is how it is to be so alien that my name falls from me, grows untranslatable as the shop signs, the odors of ginseng and black fungus that idle in the stairwell, the corridor where the doors are blue months ajar. Hands gesture in the smoke, the partial moon of a face. For hours the soft numeric click of mah-jongg tiles drifts down the hallway where languid Mai trails her musk of sex and narcotics. There is no grief in this, only the old year consuming itself, the door knob blazing in my hand beneath the lightbulb’s electric jewel. Between voices and fireworks wind works bricks to dust—hush, hush— no language I want to learn. I can touch the sill worn by hands I’ll never know in this room with its low table where I brew chrysanthemum tea. The sign for Jade Palace sheds green corollas on the floor. It’s dangerous to stand here in the chastening glow, darkening my eyes in the mirror with the gulf of the rest of my life widening away from me, waiting for the man I married to pass beneath the sign of the building, to climb the five flights and say his Chinese name for me. He’ll rise up out of the puzzling streets where men pass bottles of rice liquor, where the new year is liquor, the black bottle the whole district is waiting for, like some benevolent arrest—the moment when men and women turn to each other and dissolve each bad bet, every sly mischance, the dalliance of hands. They turn in lamplight the way I turn now. Wai Min is in the doorway. He brings fish. He brings lotus root. He brings me ghost money.

The aeroplane is shaped like a bird Or a giant mechanical penis My father escorts my mother From girlhood to unhappiness A dragonfly has iridescent wings Shorn, it’s a lowly pismire Plucked of arms and legs A throbbing red pepperpod Baby, she’s a girl Pinkly propped as a doll Baby, she’s a pearl An ulcer in the oyster of God Cry little baby clam cry The steam has opened your eyes Your secret darkly hidden The razor is sharpening the knife Abandoned taro-leaf boat Its lonely black sail broken The corpses are fat and bejeweled The hull is thoroughly rotten The worm has entered the ear And out the nose of my father Cleaned the pelvis of my mother And ringed around her fingerbone One child beats a bedpan One beats a fishhook out of wire One beats his half sister on the head Oh, teach us to fish and love Don’t say her boudoir is too narrow She could sleep but in one cold bed Don’t say you own many horses We escaped on her skinny mare’s back Man is good said Meng-Tzu We must cultivate their natures Man is evil said Hsun-Tzu There’s a worm in the human heart He gleaned a beaded purse from Hong Kong He procured an oval fan from Taiwan She married him for a green card He abandoned her for a blonde My grandmother is calling her goslings My mother is summoning her hens The sun has vanished into the ocean The moon has drowned in the fen Discs of jade for her eyelids A lozenge of pearl for her throat Lapis and kudzu in her nostrils They will rob her again and again

after Billy Collins, "Silence" You have the right to remain silent. That is your job. A ball gag plugs your mouth, and the immigrant girl with her loud sewing machine has been deported. So tell us about the mind of China. We want to hear the silent blooming of its cherry blossoms, the quiet unfastening of its gowns, its songs of soy sauce and tiny bound feet. Its trains have been blown up by dynamite, its factories bombed into silence. Its mewling puppies have been smothered and its gods are suffocating inside specimen jars. Shanghai has been evacuated and each inhabitant issued an edition of Gary Snyder. So tell us about your ancestors, your grandfather in his bamboo cage, your grandmother drowned in the well. Let’s hear about the unmoving clouds, the stunted trees. Read the poem we have placed in front of you. The Pacific has been drained, and even Ezra Pound has burst from his grave, his moldering hand poised to translate what you do not say.

after Billy Collins, "Monday" The Italians are making their pasta, the French are making things French, and the Chinese cultivate their silence. They cultivate silence in every Chinatown on the persimmon of earth— mute below the towers of Toronto, silently sweeping the streets of Singapore clear of noisy self-expression. The Americans are in their sport utility vehicles, the Canadians are behaving reasonably, but the Chinese remain silent maybe with a cup of tea or an opium pipe and maybe a finger puzzle or water torture is involved. Or maybe the Chinese are playing the Chinese game of ping-pong, the pock-pock of the ball against their tight-lipped mouths as their chefs dice scallions and bean curd. The Chinese are silent because it is their job for which I pay them what they got for building the railroads. Which silence it is hardly seems to matter though many have a favorite out of the 100 different kinds— the Silence of the Well-Adjusted Minority, the Girlish Silence of Reluctant Acquiescence, the Silence that by No Means Should Be Mistaken for Bitterness. By now, it should go without saying that what Crocodile Dundee is to the Australian and Mel Gibson is to the Scot, so is silence to the Chinese. Just think— before I invented the 100 Chinese silences, the Chinese would have had to stay indoors and gabble about civil war and revolution or go outside and build a really loud wall. And when I say a wall, I do not mean a wall of thousands of miles that is visible from the moon. I mean a noisy wall of language that dwarfs my medieval battlements and paves the Pacific to lap California’s shores with its brick-hard words.