Bok Choy LoveBy Tiffany Hsieh
|
|
Our anniversary comes like a squall during my drive home, a sixty-minute petrol-numbing waste of time. There I am sitting in time and time is a petrified vegetation of slush. The black pickup in the rear-view flashes its blinding headlights twice. Is the idiot signalling me to move up two feet of vegetated time in a lowland of wheels and rims? Does the idiot not know that I am using this time to think about our anniversary and the vegetables that would define our love at this time? Must we, too, face the candlelight and order something that spirals up in the middle of a plate that is mostly rim and then be judged by the waiter who wants to know if we’d be having dessert? In slush, I idle like a lump of bok choy and wait for the lights to change.
In HindsightBy Tiffany Hsieh
We didn’t come here to be us. We came here to be like you. Ma and Ba paid money to come and my brother and I we left our homework undone. There was no upheaval or war. And just like that we were here like you but it was unclear if we were anything alike. We didn’t tan like you. We didn’t entertain like you. We didn’t tango-skate like you in those tango outfits like yours. Here we came to be. There we worshipped your alphabets and movie stars and french fries. Anyway, we longed to be like you while we were most likely just being ourselves. And just like that we liked you and we liked to think that you liked us, too. After all, Ma and Ba paid a price to come and my brother and I we played our parts to stay.
Tiffany Hsieh is a Canadian writer living in Stouffville, Ontario. She holds a Master's degree in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of Gloucestershire. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Ricepaper Magazine, the Spadina Literary Review, The Cabinet of Heed, The Northern Appeal, and others.
|
