Jenny Xie

Nowhere in those kerosene years could she find a soft-headed match. The wife crosses over an ocean, red-faced and cheerless. Trades the flat pad of a stethoscope for a dining hall spatula. Life is two choices, she thinks: you hatch a life, or you pass through one. Photographs of a child swaddled in layers arrive by post. Money doesn’t, to her embarrassment. Over time, she grows out her hair. Then she sprouts nerves. The wife was no fool, but neither did she wander. She lives inside a season of thrift, which stretches on. Her sorrow has thickness and a certain sheen. The wife knows to hurry when she washes. When she cooks, she licks spoons slowly. Every night, she made a dish with ground pork. Paired with a dish that was fibrous.

Ice, entire cakes of it. Crows feed on sand. So poor is this season the ground steals color from the tree-shadows. • Can it be that nothing is as far as here? Just look! How much past we have to cover this evening– • Come to think of it don't forget to pick off this self and that self along the way. Though that’s not right– you spit them out like pits. • If there is a partition between the outer and inner worlds, how is it that some water in me churns between the mountain ranges? How is it we are absorbed so easily by the ground— • Long nights for simple words. • Slant rhyme of current thinking and past thinking. A chewed over hour, late. Where the long ago past and the future come to settle scores. • Traveling and traveling, but so much interior unpicked over by the eyes. • Nothing is as far as here.

The Sangre de Cristo Mountains mottled as if with oil stains. Configurations of cloud-shadows. Easy gait of hours: a way through — or into — the dry winds. Our church is the mountains, says the guide to the tour group, all of whom have been instructed to keep their cameras inside their bags. 
A group crowding the aisles of San Geronimo Chapel. On the dirt path between adobe structures, bareheaded. Stretching, palms out, as steam from the boiling pot does. To move along the earth without keeping a ledger. The horsefly not so incongruous with the sagebrush. Still, reflexive swatting. We’re good citizens, we serve in the Army, though we’re regarded as second 
class by the US government. Framed badges and news stories in the house of the retired sheriff. Men in his family who have been policemen, firemen, soldiers. His wife pinching the ears of bear sculptures formed from mica clay. Thick paste of red soil and the piñon that pierces through it. To carry on from day to day without exercising the sloppy hand of 
manipulation. Four dollars for a plate of fry bread in cinnamon butter. The boy at the counter restless, wanting to get back to the electronic dance 
music on pause on his iPhone. Reading a history backward, the deep strata. Settling on this life as a parasite on its host. That man next door who you bought from? He sells jewelry made by an Anglo woman. His wife. The stray dog asleep on her side, dreams ripped from her open jaw. Money touched from hand to hand. Whole lifetimes spent trying to make sense of an appetite. A town called Tres Orejas.Three ears. Plenty.

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.