Taint

Because I’m my mother’s son, I leave the arrow
in my throbbing heart. What kills me keeps me
alive. I forgive nothing, forget nothing. Revenge,
no matter how or when, is my only satisfaction.
Consider a glass saucer of apple cider vinegar
on the table overnight, a fleet of drowned fruit
flies in the morning. Consider my father’s face
snipped from photographs, smothered without
protest in a grocery bag. Consider my mother
and I cleaning our apartment early each Sunday,
My Immortal on the radio, animating the dead
space between us, nerve-pinching silence within
which we attend to our lives, reorganizing this
museum of decadent suffering, this performance
of union. Consider us scrubbing the musk of sleep
from every sheet, sweeping away our footsteps,
stretching plastic over the couch, the computer,
shining the fancy plates we never use but aspire to
as though our immaculate illusion redeems the filth
of being human, our attempts to outlast our fate
by forcing evidence of our existence on the world.
Consider existence an underestimated vengeance.
This is why, betrayed by her country, by everyone
she knows, her only child hoping to be adopted
by a white family, to be a little white girl or boy
so spotless that nobody dares to foul it, my mother
denies everything afflicting her its brutal power
by exterminating her attachments like roaches.
Consider her obsessive sanitation not a symptom
but a skill set of expulsion: how she disappears
blood from blade, my body splayed like a headless
Barbie on the bathroom floor, wrists slashed into
mouths shouting what I couldn’t, what I’m told
didn’t ever occur. Consider how she beats me
straight with a snakeskin belt, says I’m nothing
like my father because I belong to a war-woman,
and that’s love: possession, my mother preparing
me for victory the way our ancestors drilled iron-
tipped spikes into the ancient B?ch ??ng River,
skewering Southern Han attackers like th?t n??ng,
their blue carcasses pruning in low tides, ending
a thousand years of domination, the Long Eclipse.