CW: references to gun violence, blood

look at this globe. look at this older globe. isn’t it funny how things change? everything becomes dizzy in memory — yellow dandelions gasping for breath, my fingers tracing the lines in dad’s palms. & the blue glare of capitol hill never stops swelling. explain to me why the world keeps spinning but we don’t feel it. how when you’re constantly moving, it becomes second nature to flee the ground you’re standing on. when the plane landed the air started wilting around us. 爷爷 carried me the way home. the brutalist architecture swallowed storms and the whole world unfolded like a box. everything opening again.

*

i memorised the anthem and i memorised it again. picked apart my nicest dress and asked 奶奶 to thread it back together. we unmake this city; we tear apart its linen bedsheets. the apartment walls burnt into an etching of faded thumbprints. a girl readying herself against a moonlit mirror, all to be taken. the country cocking a gun. tell me how it’s for the violence and nothing more. how sometimes the only space between a girl and her home is a fistful of bullets, flung out under a red palm. stagger in half-drunk and leave me dizzy. she said to the class that poppies were dyed bloody only after gallipoli, after what had to be done was done and everyone could pack up their suitcases and go home. but the fields stayed red forever, of course they did. to bleed, then, is to survive beyond skin, leak out debris in two places at once — to entangle yourself in the arms of any country that’ll have you.

*

say breakfast. say land. say idiom. say freedom. i wanted to use the word tenderness in this poem but i couldn’t fit it in. that morning i wanted to be forgiven so i prayed and read the dictionary. when i went on stage he said congratulations. i said take me. afterwards they gave us a plastic flag and a koala doll and i kept both on my desk for three years. today i find plastic flags littered on the floor of my dreams. i pick them up and kiss them as though the feet of holy gods. at three, i mistook the clovers on capitol hill for rare dandelions and plaited them through mum’s hair. later, the computer said they were weeds and i cried and cried and cried

until my face was wet
with whole river streams and i
surrendered to land