Return flight Poems

Jennifer Huang

Book - 2022

"Selected by Jos Charles as the winner of the 2021 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, Return Flight is a lush reckoning: with inheritance, with body, with trauma, with desire-and with the many tendons in between"--

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Subjects
Genres
Poetry
Published
Minneapolis, Minnesota : Milkweed Editions 2022.
Language
English
Main Author
Jennifer Huang (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
75 pages ; 22 cm
Awards
Ballard Spahr Prize
ISBN
9781571315281
  • Neighborhood Walk
  • ¿
  • Departure
  • Customs
  • Disaster
  • Fantasy Self-Erasure
  • That dawn at the beach
  • Notes on Orange
  • Tanka
  • haiku
  • Procedure
  • 228
  • ¿
  • Departure
  • From the Taiwan Cypress in Alishan
  • Individualism
  • Disorder
  • A Visit from Brother Ghost on the Harvest Moon
  • I fear the baby
  • Poem for giving birth
  • Among a sea of clouds
  • Turbulence
  • Ode to Menstruation
  • The Creek
  • Pleasure Practice
  • ¿
  • Layover
  • ¿
  • Departure
  • After the Storm
  • Song of chou doufu
  • Self-Pleasure
  • How to Love a Rock
  • On Days I Stay with My Father
  • Relief
  • Nonconcordant
  • Tongue-Tied
  • Drift
  • Zuihitsu for Yushan
  • Manifest
  • Notes
  • Gratitude

Customs "What language conceals is said through my body." --Roland Barthes I touched everything, but the more I touched, I learned, the more I broke. Like the time with the stairwell bannister, that spot already on its way. I just helped it to its fate. My father saw and warned he'd break my arm, leaving me to wonder if my arm was mine or his. There's more but if I translated all he said, it would sound sweeter. My brother, the one to come and soothe. My brother, years later also the one to hit me while I was watching tv-- a smack interrupting and a sudden welt on my back. My breath was gone. Funny, how I can forgive my brother, not my father for teaching him. And no, I can't praise my father for never hitting me--his threats, a metronome keeping my life in rhythm. If I try hard enough, I can forget but a part of me wishes to keep my hand on these memories, to feel them to their ends. Earlier today, I touched a hot pan and dropped my dinner, then flinched as I waited for the voice. Once, I let a lover place his hands around my throat. I don't want to like it. My body, powerless with another; forgiveness before I can even shape the words. Individualism At Lowe's, a store clerk helps me cut a sheet of plexiglass, his hands pulling the blade as he tells me he quit school when he realized creative writing wouldn't earn him money. I laugh at the irony as I admit my field of study. On the way out, glass in hand, the smell of hotdogs makes me recall those Lowe's trips dad and I would take, how I'd walk with him through the aisles feeling small. He would lecture me about earnings, property, and stocks; the importance of making a living and saving. Creativity was a luxury he never had. Afterwards, he would hand me a treat: soft pretzel and a hotdog. A hard day's work always ended with nourishment. I never felt empty in that way. His hands were gentle when I called him babi instead of baba . When I start my car, I remember how he used to pinch my cheeks until I grew out of it, until I shied away, learning touch could also mean purple , blue, bab y--then notice how the radio continues playing the song I had heard when I first stepped out. Pleasure Practice I am aligning myself with pleasure. This means daily I pray for theirs--my neighbors who fuck loud. They fight the same. I learn the sound is better than the silence after. Stars as I try to see straight when I rise from knees too swiftly. Hands like rainfall. This is not what I imagined. A man and I once kissed in his car until we didn't. Enough , he said, pulling away. Was my greed or desire too big to hold? Truth is I didn't want a man. Really, I want to feel all of me realize what is, what is; my body, in existence; enough. Layover Taiwan is written all over your face , the 7-Eleven clerk says at check-out. His name, that of a gem: Topaz, who's been to Kaohsiung, Guangdong, Fujian, Shanghai, Beijing-- I have never been. Your place s, he says and I bristle at the mixing, though delighted by my face: a map I apparently can't hide. The shame, then, at my delight: I just want to be close. Back in a house, this map devours softness: a spoonful of coffee-flavored san-yi melting on the tongue and into me. Then, a memory: tsua-bing and ai-yu to cool the climate-- everywhere, bodies sweating into one. do i do, to taiwan, as the man does to me. Zuihitsu for Yushan I open my eyes to let him go. At twenty, when drafting my first poem about Taiwan, I wrote: Where I am from / summer comes like a man / watching me, I am no longer human --Back then, the speaker was always me, the poet. I wrote what I knew. I live in a perpetual state of I don't know is what you once said to me. Imagine what I don't know, I don't know. just thin breeze black hair / short nails high grass dirt-/colored rain --this discomfort was my peace. If I had known then what was still to come. One possible title for this poem: "Mountain Splitting." I Google it and find a Chinese myth. (The algorithm works.) It goes like this: a goddess falls in love with a mortal. Eventually they marry and the goddess bears a half-god son. Then, from heaven, the goddess' brother becomes furious and decides to imprison her inside a lotus-like mountain peak. When the son grows up and learns this story, he travels to look for his mother. He meets a Daoist master, who trains him and gives him a magical ax. With it, he defeats his uncle in combat and splits open the mountain to free the goddess, his mother. I don't know if they rejoice. This part has not yet been written. I write this from a stranger's house, his cat sitting next to me. Twice a day, I fill up Bruno's bowl, and three times, I check his litterbox. I don't feel lost even though I must find the spatula, remote, coffee mug, towel. I admire the jade plant by the window. A wish to cradle a leaf green between my fore and thumb, feel its curves. Q: Why the impulse to bring back an old poem? A: I do not believe in the concluding lines, is not where I am from. I am not from / not where I am from I am not . Q: Why the impulse to traverse old habits? A: I believe in the refusal to explain. I have done it again. I made a man my mountain and burrowed inside. I write this from a coffee shop, holding Tina Chang's Hybrida . It is becoming evident that jades follow me. Their green touches me blue. What else touches? The lines at the end of "Fury": love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and love and my mind, a cat I try to call down. This morning, I wore blood-scent and a face. I put distance between this man and me, love and me, I and me. One origin of the verb to know means "to experience, live through" or "to have sexual intercourse with." Is loving someone accepting the unknown? I climb the mountain, this man. His rocks I get close to--I could kiss. I take my ax and almost split. I stop, instead, to hear the child of myself inside reciting: Where I am from / everyone is family except for me . Unborrowed from rocks and salt and dirt and root, where I go from here, I don't know. When I was on Alishan, I woke at 4am to take a train to then walk to the top; climbed it to see other mountains. Across from me, the trees split your image, sliced again by the rising sun. Yushan, named for the way the snow makes you translucent like a jade. My stone around your neck. I could almost touch you. I did by not. Excerpted from Return Flight by Jennifer Huang All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.