In memoriam of the Second Sino-Japanese War
I’d imagine my way out of the womb. The mesh of radio static
and amniotic iodine, revealing a gun, curl my fingers
around the trigger in a different body. Tanks tattoo the uterus, a
gwelio folds Map of Greater East Asia into his lap,
I stink of kerosene and flesh through re-runs of Lugou, Canton,
the fall of Nanking. Of course, you tie contamination
with the Saṃsāra”s spin (all is liberated on top of the wheel)
but the fetus has seen atrocities archived in nitrate film.
Chiang watches bodies around us smeared in white phosphorus
while we watch the flag strewn across the Yangtze,
stained with blood plasma. 6.5mms fall in dirt slums. Surely KMT
will pan away and we will hang the Aparādhan snake,
go home bloodless and eat dinner. We don’t. The Taiping will guide
us to Nirvana, your lips rasp in my eardrums. Spine bends
heavenly backward, sweet mustard tangoes in nostrils as the golden
bullet guides us to Taixu. The Babylon willows grow
fast and crooked out of our bodies. Mô-pi. Such saccharine life, we
are reborn and re-lost into a damned second calibration.
Yama our God, Yama is one. (There is no afterlife, you self-eating heretic).
The KMT field cap isn’t bulletproof and neither am I. Awaken again,
in carnate, a deburred primordial state, these arms are not
mine but skinned off of yours. I swim in a wet sludge of burnt bodies
and they encase me, tinfoil mercilessly wrapped around
a butterstick, a bathing suit compressing my flesh. Do I reach the 18th
Naraka faster if there’s holes in my body for it to seep into?
Forgive me. I see the Enlightened watching above, but I can’t be with you.
Resurrection tastes like herbicides in the river. Soon
in Dahui a girl is named Liberty. I come out facing backwards, gasping
for breath in the ward that stinks of iodine. Now the midwife
is scrubbing blood off my naked body, but it’s not coming off. Never.