Categories
Belief and Philosophy Blog Divorce Passing in the Middle Kingdom Poetry Reading & Writing

Passing in the Middle Kingdom: The Forgetting

I have posted this poem The Forgetting elsewhere. It’s never been published by a journal. It is one of the most significant poems that I have written and I stand by it as a piece of writing. It came to me quickly.

I was at the Hong Kong ferry pier

and had a pencil and a wrinkled piece of paper in my bag. I stopped and wrote it down leaning against a steel column breathing in diesel. I was angry, bitter, upset. I don’t like to focus on how a type of creative energy works because I believe craft is important, but I admit here that the words came to me as if I was in a trance. Sometimes, you open your body up and the words tumble out. As I’ve written elsewhere, this is a strange feeling because for me, I write poetry when I have too many feelings and cannot express or name a particular emotion. It would be fair to say there’s always an idea of madness, blood, and a strange churning of the self when poems like this come to me. When you write in these moments you are not present. You come back when you edit. This poem is nearly in its original form. About three years ago, I was given some solid advice about editing and writing and the suggestion to cut the poem in half. I could not. Doing so would lose the frenzied pace of it, the instability.

Fairly obvious, but this reflected the miserable dynamic of my marriage and an attempt at escape.

New York and 57th street

The 57th street reference: a college boyfriend. Charlie committed suicide by jumping from his mother’s penthouse and died in his early 20s. I did not find out about this until years after he had jumped. I also used him, in some ways, as a model for a story from Swimming in Hong Kong that appeared in Cha Online Literary Journal Nantucket’s Laundry, 1985. This was the last story that was published from the collection. Charlie was terribly depressed, on the verge of alcoholism, completely and dangerously unstable. I learned later that he had his face completely reconstructed because he was beaten up so badly. In my memory he is young and handsome, but I also remember, due to depression, he had an eerily elderly quality to him. He had sent me a postcard from Taiwan–that was the last I had heard from him prior to learning of his death. I found the postcard, I believe around the time I wrote the poem, which is probably how this side story of the main story of my marriage made its way into the text…

 

The Forgetting

 

I descend, my body splits, and I roar to recover

quickly, urgently,

before wounds break, blood pours,

and I ravage pills of memory.

 

This body wove from man to man,

fucked and begged on hotel room floors,

bore a child and raged in a fire

as my feet burned across the continents.

 

I am called across the ocean to sands and palms,

pools that lap forests breathe hot nights on my neck.

Weepy drugs feed this cloying beast.

Wicked songs to memory and heart.

I drink your eye in a dark bar of money,

choking rage of forgetting and longing

cheating time like diamonds in a room of amputated arms.

 

In this land I join the cockroach dance,

survive the holocaust of malls

lured by spas and women on their knees.

There are ways of knowing—

an arm, a breast, an ankle acting the role of thief.

Fingers tap screens of pornographic screams,

but deadened nerves feel no skin.

I drink bitterness pressing buttons,

dropping clothes, closing doors.

An early death, a godless benediction of madness,

for this wild, I surrender all.

I forget to remember,

tongue acid rain,

lost in watery promises of the dark.

Six white hairs, a dozen soon.

Age and beauty,

orchestrated by gods gambling geography games.

 

Rising like a beast of present perfect:

A face smashed by thugs.

A body sprawled on 57th street.

Penthouse jumps are things of youth.

Suicides and lovers, friends ‘til we part,

the stuff of life lived to the bone.

I clock love and lines by years,

smells of wet nylon and stale beer,

taxi clangs of sorry lies.

A marriage scraped from the bottom of a glass,

gathered to divide, until air becomes

what I long to breathe,

joy a regret unknown.

Freedom calls. Sorrow creeps to sky.

The penury of age a certain misery.

Abandonment defies what we know as beauty,

yet to this green I leave my shell,

crawl before gods in forgiveness,

hell in my heart,

knowing the madness of it all.

Categories
Belief and Philosophy Poetry Self-help Woman. Warrior. Writer.

Adolescence and Clothing: Inner and Outer Selves

These patched retro Levi’s jeans are from my very early adolescence, fashion-wise–from that leftover phase of hippy rebellion. As someone from the GenX cut-off year, I was influenced by this era older than myself and the era in which I lived. At boarding school, I swapped three skirts for this pair of blue jeans that has small embroidered hearts in purple and pink on the back pocket. Thanks, Mary, yes, I still have them. I kept patching them, but of course, I never wore them after a period of time and they don’t really fit me.

I carted them around everywhere as an odd remembrance because it reminds me of a time when I was trying to define my interior self through clothing and all that is exterior. I don’t think about clothing like this anymore. But back then, one minute I would be dressed like X and the next minute like Y and clothing was pure costuming, fun, curiosity, rebellion, and celebration of self. I couldn’t bring myself to be something, so I wore the clothes that suggested I could be something. I am now rather utilitarian most days; I don’t think of clothing in that same way. I’m more in my body, but yet the body seems to occupy a more esoteric space. I recognize clothing as an avenue of expression, but don’t use it that much in this direction.

As I say often, this is all down to how we see death and self.

For me, the more I recognize my interior as an identity, the less I seem to get worried about the exterior. I realize that what we are in the exterior can be entirely artificial. As the membrane between the inner and outer becomes more fluid, soluble, porous, there is less to worry about. We are what we are. Life is rather short. We are temporal beings. Our body is simply our exterior shell.

Social media, avatars, the way we present can be entirely false or mystical and one can be always aware of the gap between what is seen and what is hidden. I think the easiest solution is to collapse the inner and outer. What you see is what you get. That patched jean self is carried within memory. Memory is one part of the inner self, but not necessarily a construct of the present. How I became who I am in the present, was influenced by the time I spent in these jeans, but yeah, but the cells have all regenerated. I am not that girl.

I hope this makes sense for people. For those who experience anxiety about outer appearance, know that the key is to bring the inner as close to the outer as possible. It’s a much easier way to live.

Categories
Blog Divorce Reading & Writing Self-help Teachers Woman Warrior

Woman. Warrior. Writer. Deesha Philyaw

It’s time for our WOMAN WARRIOR tribute post, done in the spirit of Maxine Hong Kingston. I hope that by presenting women writers, creators, and leaders here, that we can learn, better our own lives, and change our communities.

Today’s WOMAN WARRIOR is award winning author of short story collection, THE SECRET LIVES OF CHUCH LADIES.

Please meet Deesha Philyaw 👩🏿📚

@deeshaphilyaw’s debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, and the 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. The collection focuses on Black women, sex, and the Black church, and is being adapted for television by HBOMax with Tessa Thompson executive producing. Learn more at: https://lnkd.in/grpcGGW

✨ How did you come to author your own life? ✨

“Growing up, my dream life was a standard American dream life: Go to college, get married, have kids, have professional success. In 2005, I was a 34-year-old stay-at-home mom on the brink of divorce, trying to figure out how I would make a living as a writer. That same year, my mother, my father, and my grandmother (who helped raise me) all died. Watching my mother die of cancer at age 52 gave me a sense of urgency about my writing, as well as permission to write how and what I want, and to live how I want, unapologetically.”

➡️ Visit https://lnkd.in/grpcGGW to learn more about this incredibly talented woman, warrior and writer.

And if you want to read and learn from–and maybe even meet–writers like this, please register for classes at drstephaniehan.com

~empowering women through narrative~

Categories
Belief and Philosophy Blog Hawai'i Health Self-help

Hawai’i: Meals

Mom made this before The Kid left for the Mainland. Ribs, potato salad, cornbread, and salad. Mom makes good ribs. Koreans do ribs well–kalbi, but these were Memphis style ribs. It is hard to fathom that my parents lived in Memphis for over 30 years! They were pioneering Korean Americans integrating the US. It is often a challenge being Asian in the South where life is constructed under a polarity of Black and White. I have relatives who live there.

Some things I loved about Memphis: Kang Rhee’s Pa Sa Ryu studio, deep fried turkey, cornbread, black-eyed peas, OK, gotta watch or I’ll just rattle off the food! Where my parents lived it was quiet. The madness of heat and the green. The steam and the slowness. I never felt fully comfortable there. But thinking about this more deeply, I am unlikely to return to the Mainland. Some people experience island fever, think they have to get off the Rock. I never feel this. I am aware this is a function of age and where I am. But I am never bored looking at the water. Listening. Looking at the flowers or mountains. Hawai’i nei.

Categories
Passing in the Middle Kingdom Reading & Writing

Passing in the Middle Kingdom: The Rape of Pink Lily

When I lived in Luk Tei Tong, one day I looked out onto the green bog and saw this perfect lily: a Red Oriental Lily.

It struck me as so strange. Someone had dumped a plant into this bog–the fallow rice fields, and it had grown. So there it was, defiant, glorious, no matter what had happened to it. It had refused to yield. People threw all kinds of stuff in the bog and there was sewage run-off and snakes and whatever else is dumped into a village green space. Drunken Brits falling into the bog. Plastic toys. Trash. Yet it remained a glorious green. The paths wound around it. In the summer, bugs and more bugs, mosquitos and lots of itchy things, so you spent a lot of time scratching (or at least I did!). Beauty is powerful.

I note I am writing in the past tense about this–but I no longer live there, so it exists in memory. Anyway, this lily was truly something. I don’t believe I ever took photo, so this poem would have to do. I lived in this village before the high rises began coming up–yes, prior to the arrival of Starbucks.

The village had old land laws that were put in place by the British colonial government to quell unrest and Communist leanings. They didn’t want the locals so figured out a way to dole out the land. Boys were allowed to inherit land. The village headman would divvy it up. The girls were not entitled to land–this was in place until quite recently–I think 2019? In order for houses to come up, multiple men would combine their small pieces of land and a developer (village headman) would put up a house to sell. Each house was a maximum of 2100 square feet, not including balconies or rooftops. People bought, sold, and rented 3 story block buildings: 1, 2, or 3 floors. For many, the only way you could access these properties was through the paths that cut through the bogs. Everyone was on a bicycle, some on foot, no cars allowed. I cannot say that the homes or the design of the village was particularly beautiful, what was truly compelling was the open green space, so rare in Hong Kong. I would get off the ferry and the chaos of the city in relief.

There was, of course, another type of chaos happening in my home. But this was an interior matter. But I do think that it colored my appraisal of whatever was beautiful–including the lily. There are always stories behind what appears to be an ideal.

 

The Rape of Pink Lily

 

Ravished by typhoon beatings,

shackled by oven coils,

Pink Lily arches over barbed wire,

fights insects that mount her limbs.

A hothouse lovely

dogs piss on her face.

She grasps mud for solace,

refuses to plead,

dreams of bees beyond tingling moss.

A loyal flower seasoned by silence

stricken by dollars,

she floats songs of ginger pathos.

 

The pornography of acquisition

sucks lucky money envelopes.

Suits snap in creased time,

the auction begins.

Men salivate. Towers rise.

Steal a kidney. Jail a poet.

Force foreheads to the ground.

Powdered beauties model rodent furs,

tongues drag along a spine,

capes crack the air.

Pink Lily guards fallow fields for sons.

She multiples.

 

Sold!

 

Flower rapes: necessity.

Earth begs for memory’s dirt.

Rats await.

How many of her stalks will line our nests?

Categories
Belief and Philosophy Blog Divorce Poetry Reading & Writing Self-help

CUT THE CORD

Cut the Cord

I cut the cord of connection

of belief

of desire

of obligation

of responsibility

of care.

I cut the cord knowing that

indifference casts myself into an unknown.

I cut the cord knowing

it no longer matters.

I cut the cord understanding intimacy

is not violent, it is knowing.

I cut the cord knowing to be seen

I need to see myself.

I cut the cord.

I cut this cord to move into

the world as my full self.

Everything I need to navigate life—

I have.

Every symbol I have

Comes from a reflection of my

interior.

I cut a cord and know that

on my own I am full

on my own I am free.

I cut the cord without fear.

I cut the cord.

© drstephaniehan #cutthecord