Su - Living Quarters: Poems

ALSO BY ADRIENNE SU MIDDLE KINGDOM
SANCTUARY
HAVING NONE OF IT LIVING QUARTERS ADRIENNE SU MANIC D PRESS
SAN FRANCISCO Living Quarters 2015 by Adrienne Su. All rights reserved. Published by Manic D Press. For information, contact Manic D Press, PO Box 410804, San Francisco CA 94141 www.manicdpress.com Printed in the USA Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Su, Adrienne, 1967 [Poems. Selections] Living quarters / Adrienne Su. original : alk. paper) I. Title. Title.

PS3569.U13A6 2015 811.54dc23 2014044711 FOR PEOPLE AND ANIMALS WHO HAVE NO HOMEI The door itself makes no promises. It is only a door. Adrienne Rich Earthbound If anticipation is the high point of travel, we ought to vacation at home, reading manuals, marking vintage hotels and undiscovered vistas, composing the meals strangers will make us, just as, lacking money, I once took Italian at the state university, cooked from Marcella Hazan, dipped in and out of Dante. Although it was Iowa City, that summer still resonates as the summer of Italy. I distinguished myself in class by having no plans to travel. Others were making it happen, flying standby, lodging in hostels.

I must have wanted a kingdom I could build in office or kitchen, then be home by bedtime, closing my eyes for vision. Chinese Parsley I never call it that. It evokes too freely: checkers, fire drill, ancient secret, zodiac, laundry, whispers. Does my culinary self object, because it isnt parsley, or my research self, because its homeland isnt China? One could venture it has spent enough centuries there to be considered citizen. It goes so speedily to seed, thats thousands of generations. If pressed to explain my aversion to the term, I would attest to the difficulty, amid shoppers and vegetables, of trying to decide is thisa taco / biryani / spring-rollweek, or is it minestrone /steak / roast chicken? when all shorthand ends in parsley.

Cilantros the better partition. Contentment On obvious levels I long for it: daily domestic certainty, light, familiarity, the family dog, family. I see an armchair reserved for the man (though thats not fair), a kitchen where pots are always astir, clamoring little ones, invasions at Easter and Christmas by in-laws, out-of-tune crowds on birthdays, board games, sporting goods, and downstairs or up, room for a child whos glimpsed her purpose to hide, unseen but not unhappy, for most of the party. As mother, I dont see myself at all, in part because the self is invisible outside mirrors and photographs, in part because Ill never occupy that house, having found the sacred space in my day, known what it had sentenced me to, and accepted with the unequivocal ease of a girl just old enough and viable. 1980 Mostly we waited, playing cards or Sorry! in the basement, while the parents sipped tea above us, salted melon seeds, dried plums, and husks mounding up in the tables center. They spoke both languages; we spoke one; we intended them to live forever.

That summer we had biked up and down the neighborhood hills, earned permission to cross one highway, and come around to the normal contradictions, matters of age and location. We could say it now: what we shared was not as it appeared. Dinner over, night coming on, we switched to Monopoly. It lasted too long; the frigid damp moved into our skinny frames. We went upstairs, nibbled the occasional plum, left the pit. The grownups sent us away, switched dialects, laughed at untranslatable anecdotes.

That was the era when we felt like tagalongs, too old to run along and play, too young to go alone. Later, dragged to Oriental Provision, which smelled of fish and scallions, we tiptoed around the owners children, who wandered the aisles with dirty feet, downcast faces, and nothing to read. We didnt all associate at school but usually said hello. Only the parents were positioned to fall into the circle mirthful, otherworldly and seem to travel. We never made it in. Kitchen Site of dumpling party, camp of holiday labor, invaded by loose-leaf, snack site, bar, pet station, it makes dinner possible but never makes dinner.

Kingdom of creative potential, it has drained creative potential for centuries. Now stocked with life-source that, neglected, turns sickness-source, it has no proprietor, only guest chefs who double as guests. Yet its rituals still reanimate all who come from other rooms, even if theyre grandmothers or look like grandmothers or know their way around. Microwave, dishwasher, kettle: they may do only one thing well (or two), but let us let them try. A room shall never own a person. Sunday Dinner As if I didnt have real work to do. Sunday Dinner As if I didnt have real work to do.

As if I had envisioned the nation my parents had. As if the elders hadnt promised something new. I was confident, like other women, like children. It couldnt swallow me; I had had a chance to refuse. And what I wanted was innocuous and common: Everyone at a single table never mind the unfinished papers, taking up a place. The gravy boat we never used.

Now, as we flailed in the sea, it would have to float us. Salvation didnt happen, by ritual or rite. The tragedy gathered slowly, litter on the road. Babies wailed. Hungry all the time, lacking appetite, I was finally ready. Someone said it in my head.

Id do it myself. Red meat. Saturday. Whoever was left. Just me? I was damned if I couldnt consume that much flesh. At the Checkout they almost always pause to ask the names of greens: bok choy, collards, mizuna, mche. At the Checkout they almost always pause to ask the names of greens: bok choy, collards, mizuna, mche.

Today Im rung up by sweet-faced teenage JAMES, who scans at speed until hes stopped by the broccoli rabe. Whats this? he mutters, and I nearly choke on the ways it is exalted with pancetta on penne, with clams, smothered in garlic, souffled, or blanched and salted while he enters the code. Oh, baby broccoli, he reads, and rolls it out of his life. Its not my age or how I see, but how I fail and fail again to be, that blinds me to what James perceives: broccoli babe.Supermarket Fruits Instead of ripening, they rot, covertly, from the center. Kiwi, mango, peach, pear imitate what they are not, fragrant lures for animals. Obdurate, the fruits take on the manner of a faux Czanne, ubiquitous, pretty, inedible.

Bought for their persuasive skins, they betray the trusting tongue: bitter, tannic, tart, long gone. If only we were false like them, we could use our perfect faces to infiltrate private spaces. When More Is Better First all the critters must have your attention. The animals are easier, not requiring reasons, but the children have complexity. The interval before they wake is always parenthetical, unusable for news or meditation. Lunch must be made, shoes found.

Youre old enough to know the alternative: days of silence, yielding more silence, plus anxiety. Sometimes feeling lost, you ask your self rhetorically what she might do if you were found. Shed speak, but shes asleep. You were warned about all of it, but all of it was in you, looking for an exit. When no one demanded your life, you gave it over anyway, to whoever was nearby. All was better when you made someone, and someone else, tiny, hungry.

Sometimes when sleep is scarce and youve exploded your dowdiness quotient, you dream of paradise, but where? At the Giant, pushing the cart of offspring and perishables, mentally packing your rucksack of breakables and dry-clean-onlys, you know how the story would end. It wouldnt even be literary. Dessert One day well be inconsolable by sugar. Non-nourishing? Non-essential? Whoever says it surely lines up ducks so as to strike them down with neither grief nor appetite. In Late November Having spurned the anonymous frozen hulks in supermarket rows, were face to face or face to beak with knowledge: we plan to salt a bird that, down the street, still starts each day without foreboding, as if being moved from grass to grass to eat, then eat, were a human benevolence, a gift from strong to meek. The kindest path.