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My mother lays the table with chopsticks & ceramic
spoons, expects you to fail at dinner. To the Chinese,
you and I are chopsticks: lovers with the same anatomies.
My mother tells you that chopsticks in Cantonese sounds
like the swift arrival of sons. My mother tongue rejoices
in its dumbness before you as expletives detonate: [two
women] [two men] [disgrace]. Tonight, I forget I am
bilingual. I lose my voice in your mouth, kiss till blood
comes so sorry does not slip on an avalanche of syllables
into sorrow. I tell you that as long as we hold each other,
no apology will be enough. Tonight, I am dreaming again
of tomorrow: another chance to eat at the feast of the living
with chopsticks balanced across the bridges of our hands
as we imbibe each yes, spit out every no among scraps of
shell or bone. Father says: kids these days are not as tough
as we used to be. So many suicides in one week. How many
times have you and I wondered about leaving our bodies
behind, the way many of us have already left? My friend’s
sister loved a woman for ten years and each word she says
to her mother stings like a papercut. Each word she does
not say burns like the lines she etches carefully into skin.
I have stopped believing that secrets are a beautiful way
to die. You came home with me for three hundred days –
to show my family that dinner together won’t kill us all.
From Ambit. Reproduced with kind permission of Ambit.