Traci Brimhall | Poetry
Rather than a Chinatown, it looks like a rundown street where a few Chinese have dropped anchor, orphans of imperial dragons, thousand-year-old recipes, and mysteries.
—Rafael Bernal, The Mongolion Conspiracy
Amid the aisles of fideo
de huevo, de arroz,
hongo negro, shitake,
crisanemos, pétalo de lili,
& clavo chino—
I remembered
how her apron pockets
kept a box-cutter,
how she bagged Mad Dog
& Wild Turkey,
or wrapped precisely—
like a gift—a pig’s foot
in wax paper.
In DF on Dolores Street
in barrio chino, south of South
Phoenix, Chinese grocers—
immigrants unassimilable
to the mixing in mestizaje—
sell spices & ingredients.
Curios too—palillos chinos,
ceramic conejos, dragóns
de oro—like those in Borges’
compendium
of imagined beasts—
saddled by kings, the main
course of emperors—& beside
them were sobres rojos,
the lai see she wrote my Chinese
name on with a gung hay
fat choy, slipping inside good
luck money. With hands
that punched at a register—
one-fingered like planting
seed in soil—those sheer hands
with barrettes or earwigs
pulled from the day’s lettuce—
she wrote the strokes
that mirrored the thinness
of hand bones. I didn’t know
the characters or luck
bought with their slice & sweep,
the spines of their first-made marks.
On envelopes
in ball-point, the name
I couldn’t sign but signed me
marked moon-phased
& moon-based New Year
in script that stayed ellipses
& recorded the paid
before I knew the received.
On market signs
in Sharpie & Spanish
naming the “Products of China,”
we might read stevedores
on galleons, coolies of empire,
how the Chinese came
for centuries to Big Lusong.
Their descendants sold
sundries in the 1930s
in copper towns of Sonora
before they were run out
by ordinance, by anti-chino violence.
At the same moment,
under Hoover & so-called
repatriation, federal & state
agents searched payrolls
for Mexican-sounding names,
executing large-scale raids
that deported over a million Mexican & Mexican Americans.
Could I sign my name
that crossing, that chiasmus
of exile or simply share
a night’s receipts—its archive
of salditos, pack of Pall Malls,
tins of potted meat?
An IOU &
salt’s cure, the longhand
she learned in a village schoolhouse—
long they say for long life,
long as glass noodles—keeps
sound & stores meaning,
writing in the margins or corners,
those tienditas a la esquina
where paths meet or knot
like cut rope or twist like those
figures of dragons.
“Inscrutable,”
Borges writes of their infinite
shapes, & yet goes on in detail
about claws, horns & scales,
their large horse-like heads
& snaking tail, the medicinal
uses of their teeth, how they keep
a pearl chained to their necks,
& broil “whole shoals of fish”
with one breath, how one moves
like a river rising from earth,
backbone bristling with spines.
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