AlliterAsian (21 page)

Michael Prior

Ricepaper
19, no. 2 (2014)

ANY OTHER PHOTO I

Awake or not? He can't quite tell. He walks

upon a dream's meniscus, looks beneath

at the stars sieved through cloudbank, the island's

endless silhouette bleeding into night.

Overheard through oceanic static:

accidents on the freeway, a TV's

foreign whisper in his ear. Dim voices

unravel his fears in small attritions:

a coat's lost buttons, a misplaced handful

of change. Perhaps they're always awaiting

rediscovery. A pallid photo

in the attic, a younger man within.

And when he brushes back the dust, he hopes

to meet the boy who offered him this skin.

ANY OTHER PHOTO II

So, he's awake. The pact he made with age

clipped and shuffled neatly into a drawer.

His other quiet covenant remains

engrained in imagined frames of cedar,

wasting skeletal. Stalks of crabgrass, bruised

sky of thistle: a dim communion.

Perhaps it's there, where he buried four years,

that he could map memory onto place.

A lost lure stirs up the silt in his brain,

while names he can't recall drift pellucid;

their spines and fins are slim tines of shadow.

The bed sheets crease between his knees, sculpting

valleys, fences, cedar shacks: a country

he had to forget in order to know.

       
A
BOUT THE
P
OET

Michael Prior's poems have appeared in numerous journals across Canada, America, and the UK. Michael was the winner of
Magma Poetry
's 2013 Editors' Prize,
Grain
's 2014 Short Grain Contest, and
The Walrus
's 2014 Poetry Prize. His first chapbook,
Swan Dive
, was published by Frog Hollow Press in 2014. His first full-length collection, focusing on inter-generational memory and his grandparents' internment as Japanese Canadians, is forthcoming from Véhicule Press in spring 2016. In fall 2015, Michael will be starting an MFA in poetry at Cornell University.

Crecien Bencio

Ricepaper
19, no. 2 (2014)

FAMILY OF THIEVES

We are a family of thieves. We take your things from the

lost and found: the single wool mitt, the water bottles, the

abandoned umbrellas. We bring our own Tupperware to

buffet restaurants and sit in a booth against a wall, the

perfect formation to transfer food to our laps. The hats

you left at the park after dark, the plastic toys strewn

on the beach become rightfully ours. The novellas you

have yet to read on your bedside table slip into purses

unbeknownst. Your medicine cabinets pilfered at your

housewarming party. Our pockets overflow with packets

of sugar, brown on the left, Splenda on the right, with

stir sticks hidden, like a hair pin beneath our bangs. But

look closely at our hands, for our faces will always be hidden,

in the back of restaurants, in the corners of crowded

rooms, alone, beneath a wall of darkness and trees you

will never see, you will never know, but our hands, flickering

like moths, quick, like paper burnt to ash.

       
A
BOUT THE
P
OET

Crecien Bencio's poetry has previously been published in
Ricepaper
magazine. His work revolves around the dynamics of his family and the bridging of Filipino and Canadian cultures. He lives in the Renfrew-Collingwood neighbourhood of Vancouver.

Rita Wong

Ricepaper
19, no. 4 (2014)

JOURNEY TO THE WEST

canoe journeyers are

coast protecting itself

where ocean meets rock is home

when ocean meets oil is poison

one container crash turns

fresh sea urchin breakfast

to wretched carcinogen

if nothing ever spills, leaks or collides

(implausible & impossible)

the burn itself still bankrupts children's lives

forecloses futures

earth monkey, girl spirit, one of millions

whose parents migrated to turtle island

on this journey to the west

modestly does what the coast calls us to do

to protect future monkeys

even a future for corporations

depends on guardians

protecting the coastal home

that we are part of

home in the big sense

ancient as basic stone

mischievous monkeys don't always want to be seen

they want to be together-doing

with Mission monks, Musqueam mothers

Tsleil-Waututh stewards, urban res relations,

Penticton peach trees, Peace River pigs,

Squamish sisters, Hope horses,

Nanaimo nannies, Chilliwack children

Tofino teachers, Clayoquot crows

this could be a new story

in an old world

thousands of Coast Salish years

of advanced forest coexistence

to be respected, together

BODY BURDEN: A MOVING TARGET

       
A
BOUT THE
P
OET

Rita Wong is the author of four books of poetry:
undercurrent
(Nightwood, 2015),
sybil unrest
(co-written with Larissa Lai, Line Books, 2008),
forage
(Nightwood, 2007), and
monkeypuzzle
(Press Gang, 1998).
forage
won Canada Reads Poetry 2011. Wong received the Asian Canadian Writers' Workshop Emerging Writer Award in 1997 and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in 2008. Building from her doctoral dissertation, which examined labour in Asian-North American literature, her work investigates the poetics of water and the relationships between social justice, ecology, and decolonization.

Evelyn Lau

Ricepaper
20, no. 1 (2015)

JANUARY

    
These are the days of not writing.

    
January, the month of no words.

    
Wine tastes watered down, food

    
so flavourless I gnaw a hole

    
in the side of my mouth.

    
mining the salt crystal of blood.

    
its candy tang. The fog again,

    
shrink-wrapping trees and buildings,

    
erasing the bay. The opposite shore

    
a leaf etching under wax paper,

    
milk glass, the faint sketch

    
of a fossil in stone. It's not

    
the light, or lack of it. Small birds

    
rustle in the bare trees,

    
searching for winter berries.

    
Nothing's missing. What's not here?

VISITATION

    
A mosquito in cold October!

    
The season's gone haywire.

    
I wake to the insect's furtive buzz,

    
a miniature chainsaw zipping past.

    
The welt rising on my cheek

    
like a port-wine stain.

    
The dream torn open into consciousness—

    
The superstitious might say

    
you're a restless spirit hovering

    
between two spheres, message-laden,

    
unavenged. We are again by the sea

    
—a place we never were—

    
white boats tilting on rough water.

    
For whole blind minutes after waking

    
I can't recall how you died, then remember

    
you drowned, in a way (the sea),

    
aspirating your own vomit after days

    
of drinking. The black dogs again.

    
That loneliness Renee said
no one person
,

    
no crowd
, could assuage.

    
Outside, the generator hum of the city.

    
Roars of agony, revelry. Sirens speeding past,

    
slashing through the downtown arteries.

    
Laughter in the distance, first light.

MID-AUTUMN FESTIVAL

    
In August you bought a box of moon cakes

    
and ate every last one by yourself.

    
Even kept the beribboned gift bag

    
for yourself. You refused to remember

    
the traditions, to honor the ritual

    
of sharing these symbols of family unity

    
and togetherness. The cakes sat

    
in your belly like cakes of soap

    
or packed mud, so dense and heavy they hurt—

    
the salted egg yolk crumbling between

    
your teeth, the grit of seeds and nuts

    
and chunks of sugared melon, the furrowed

    
pastry stamped with calligraphy

    
you never learned to read. Maybe this

    
was compensation for something that drifted

    
out of reach your entire childhood …

    
But even if love was never said,

    
even if they called fat little pig,

    
they kept nothing for themselves.

    
Drank mug after mug of hot water

    
to trick their stomachs into fullness

    
while feeding you mounds of rice

    
piled with pork and pickled vegetables,

    
bowls of congee studded with century egg,

    
pastries swollen with red bean and lotus seed.

    
You were a monster: hungry all the time

    
and furious, squeezing slices of Wonderbread

    
and gobs of margarine into raw yellow balls

    
you shoved into your mouth, sobbing.

    
It was worse than hunger, said the Japanese monks

    
in training, worse than the beatings—

    
those weeks when they trekked into the cities

    
to beg and were forced to eat every morsel

    
heaped into their copper bowls. The pain

    
of satiation worse than the windy emptiness

    
howling through their bellies the rest of the year.

       
A
BOUT THE
P
OET

Evelyn Lau is a Vancouver writer who has published eleven books, including six volumes of poetry. Her first book,
Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid
(HarperCollins, 1989) was made into a CBC movie starring Sandra Oh in her first major role. Evelyn's prose works have been translated into a dozen languages; her poetry has received the Milton Acorn Award, the Pat Lowther Award, a National Magazine Award, and a Governor-General's nomination. Evelyn served as Vancouver's Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2014; her most recent collection,
A Grain of Rice
(Oolichan, 2012), was shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Award and the Pat Lowther Award.