kelly zen-yie tsai
Burying
Bones
For Ricardo and Lucretia
Human bones are not like bird bones
They are not light
They are not easy to carry
Their physics do not beg them to fly
Or navigate us around nature’s changes
We,
Lonesome-headed
Without formation,
Move or are moved
To escape more
Than the dead of winter
Bones not made for these migrations,
Our bodies detach from evolutionary sources
Branded with the fingerprints of
Greed, violence, and the stink of poverty
Our bones make it look easy
Eating history and biology like calcium
Growing strong by hiding
Awkward questions in our marrow
Birds dive between skyscrapers
As we rest our tired bones
Licking the rims of intoxication
Joining three corners of the earth:
Brown, yellow, and black
Around a tiny table in
Getting shitty, laughing
Our bones obscure why we are here
The promise of our flesh
Flying from lived revolutions
Flipping capitalist to communist
Or socialist to capitalist
We hear the echoes that warn
To not take freedom for granted
We survive the lives of our parents and grandparents,
Bones formed under the heat, water, wind, and land
Of
Here in
Except for the choice that we are always reminded of
That we didn’t have to come here
That we could have always stayed
And let
Trudging across the hemispheres as it always has,
Building factories
that reshape and demolish bones,
Stitching together
governments with Elvis, English, Christianity, the CIA
Dealing dollars embossed with white men’s ghosts,
False teeth chattering beneath close-lipped smiles
We three have not lost our gift
To conjure on command to
Taste the humidity in the air
Paint the colors of the foods
Nestle into rhythms of words
Whose meanings we cannot easily describe
Envision the foreign adolescence of our ancestors
Folding her eyes into a dark horizon,
Lucretia imaged life falling from her parents’ bones
Feet hands hearts split across time zones
Wondering what earth will claim them and us
When our souls, not our bones, decide to leave it
I dream those breaking cliffs in
Where the family funereal plots hang
In sheer defiance like eagle talons
Spirits drifting so fast into the gray valley below
The cliffs are steep and narrow enough
That your reach your hands to the ground
To catch yourself dizzy before you fall
I resurrect the strangeness of death
Made even more gawky in
Laminated photos document the life of people
Born Buddhist and dead Christian
As interpreted in words and gods
Never spoken by their mothers
Closed caskets are buried in neighborhoods
Made in the years of our parents’ births
To get away from people who look like us,
Indifference bought by entire lifetimes,
Allowing us to stay a month, a year, a family, an
eternity
Learning to work while biting down on tongues
Transforming into something
That is neither this world nor that
My mother chats on her cell phone
Weaving between English and Mandarin
As my father steadies the wheel of their car
The adaptations mark and shape our flesh
Brown, yellow, and black
Making it fit, making it do
But our bones do not forget
They can’t forget
They don’t forget
They can’t forget
They don’t
Human bones are not like bird bones
They are not light
They are not easy to carry
▫
to be a
martyr
you must believe
in something
so unmistakably
that flesh falls away
from the skeleton
bones crumble
into air
all you are
left with
is spirit
pure spirit
you let go
of resurrections
rebirths, mad-
dash escapes
you accept
finality
the blinding
of the light
you are
truly committed
and for
the newspapers
that paint you
as a madwoman
and all the
detractors
who could not
believe
how heartless
and cruel this
foreign woman
was (and isn’t it
always a foreign
woman?)
how she didn’t
love the child
she held in
her arms
carried in
her belly 9
months before
how she would
just as soon
blow the child to bits
as guide her nipple
into its mouth
how she filled
the baby bottle
with lotion concocted
for explosion
and they and the
plane would have
gone down in
charred flames
the mystery
wafting over
the atlantic
of how this
woman could
have ever loved
this child
to kill in the
name of jihad
but i say
it was not
quite that
it’s never anything
so impersonal
no, i say
it was right there
under her shirt
along her breast
tucked into
her baby’s mouth
as clean as
the milk that
seeped from
her chest
as natural
as the baby’s
skull
at rest
upon her shoulder
it was
something as close
as this
that made her do it
without
hesitation
confident
that this life
this way
is not worth living
for all
■