Gone Growing: Final Portfolio
Joyce H. Wu
The Poetry Project Professor Nathalie Anderson December 3, 2013
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3 window September 5, 2013 radishes. I’ve never held one, but if I got the chance I would slice it paper thin and stick the pieces to my kitchen window at dawn. if I could unfold one pane into short sleeves, a collar, and three buttons, I’d be six years old again: clawing holes into the shoulders of her shirt, kicking into her collarbones, screaming, but screaming from joy and the knowledge that she’d never let me fall.
4 Happy Valley September 11, 2013 it happened early Monday morning. a ten-minute drive from the hospital you hurried to, an armed gang of six stole fifty boxes and ten buckets of blood plasma from a building in North Point. but you were safe at the Adventist in aptly-named Happy Valley, and the next morning, still there, still struggling to become a mother, I guess you were in labor for 30 hours so you probably didn’t have time to read the paper… I did read the paper, I remember Baba taking it with him to the loo. these are the things you remember about that Tuesday — not the news itself but your husband taking it to the bathroom, just as what you remember from later still doesn’t include armed robberies or even wars, but rather how the first day you brought me home, he went out to dinner with his friends.
5 bound September 18, 2013 they write stories about girls like the one you might have been: turn-of-the-century oriental lotuses with lotus feet. (there’s a breaking behind that beauty.) but you refused bound feet; you were instead Moscow-bound, an idealistic young Communist who didn’t know being imminently bound by doctrine and threats of death. the people you would one day be one of remember 1929 and think “depression.” you remembered and thought of your firstborn child. son. the Nationalist who took after your later leanings. you planned four more so that the first words of their names could be zhong guo guang ming ding. “China will certainly shine bright.” did you think it portentous when your second baby, the one whose name meant country, died? nation kingdom state you ended up knowing war and running, never able to understand Simon & Garfunkel when they sang “ho-o-omeward bound.” at the age of three, you refused to be bound, but I only ever knew you wheelchair-bound, creeping dementia-bound. (one of the last times I saw you, you were in greenface. you mistook your toothpaste for moisturizer.) I knew you bound to British Columbia, to your youngest son. and the rest: California, Illinois, Maryland, none of them China-bound.
6 how did it feel, 1913? September 25, 2013 how did it feel, nameless woman on horseback, to lead a procession of only women through the nation’s capital, presidential in your bearing? how did it feel, Alice Paul, to stand tall with your banner, and to stand true to your motto, “Deeds not Words”? how did it feel, throng after throng of women, to be screamed down, shoved down, beaten down by throng after throng of men for the heinous claim of saying you were people? how did it feel, Ida Wells, to know that your blackness and that of so many others was only welcome at the end of the thousands-long procession? how did it feel, women from China, Japan, the Philippines, if you heard about the march at all from California, to know that this country thought of you not as women? how did it feel, Nacotchtank and Piscataway women, to watch yourselves absent from a parade on streets that were once your own land?
7 Bumble Bees and Suet Pudding October 2, 2013 Even “bed-ridden” implies too much movement; there is no riding here, only manuscripts as quilts, and quilts as carpets between empty milk-glasses on the floor of Monk’s House. Sometimes a dog or a husband for company. Most faithful, though, are Virginia’s visions, perfect in their unrealistic romanticism: Vita, short for Victoria but Latin for Life, a satyr—by Praxiteles’ account, pure, tame, fearless— dancing Kentish hops into beer; too full of movement and poetry to write longer letters, much less to visit; too full of charm to walk or dance anywhere but in Virginia’s moonlit mind. There, Vita: garden-walking and tennis-playing and digging and sitting and smoking and talking— the most mundane imaginings; the only ones that keep Virginia from tipping into nightmares. “...if you came, I should perhaps dream the other way about— of bumble bees and suet pudding.”
8 Margaret Bailey Speer October 2, 2013 Who you must have been to receive such a hyperbolic plea from twenty-four Beijing college faculty. How you must have been to be the object of such longing— particularly for these women, who had just emerged from being occupied by Japan; who were about to be war-torn once again.
9 Complementarity October 18, 2013 she’s just a girl who lives down the hall from me this year, but freshman spring, we went In Search of Reality together. every Thursday from one fifteen to four in a seminar room, we pretended to understand what consciousness, collapse, entanglement, and complementarity had to do with Physics 2B — Quantum Theory: In Search of Reality. like the fact that I’m self-aware? like the way I fall on my bed at night? like my legs in the covers? like how I’m perfect for someone who doesn’t see me? these concepts we understood. eigenvectors, though? no. our professor wearing the same sweater every week all the way into May, how he looked like Ernie from Sesame Street, the way he struggled into class with Trader Joe’s bags overflowing with more bags, how the girl who lives down the hall now brought oranges and a citrus juicer and made us all juice, how on the last day of class at our professor’s house, I almost got run over on a highway coming out of the woods and forded a rocky creek bed in the dark: these concepts we understand.
10 Promise October 24, 2013 Every time I look out a window to this rural village — in a book, on a screen, at a museum — I can't help but hear my tone-deaf father trying to be like Don McLean: Starry, starry night... How many times have I looked out a window to this rural village? How many times — and how did I never before look down from ocean skies and fried-egg stars and notice mountains, a church spire, houses? Lit windows, cricket lullabies, star-humming, bedtime prayers, snoring dogs, the night air. Shifting trees. Stoic mountains. The promise that the stars and moon will set, and that the sun will rise.
11 space within October 30, 2013 -7. violets woven deftly into hair, smile honeyed, voice sweet and low— neither saccharine. centuries. what else. 20. lyres for arms, effaced, refaced, defaced, capacious and overlarge: “Lesbian lyricist” redefined. 21.
12 high tide November 6, 2013 you are gaping, synchronous moon, pulling at under bed sheets, under skin. salt flows, laps at lip and tongue shores.
13 her dress when you saw it November 21, 2013 Sleep comes slow, reluctant, a leaf clinging to its tree despite winds that render your sisters unto the ground. For her dress when you saw it stirred you. And within you now is quickening, quickening. Wait. The breeze comes again. With it, falling. And the folds of her skirt.