Pleco

2 Minutes Read Time

Painting by Louise Ling Edwards featuring Chinese characters in black and red on light and dark blue backgrounds.
Painting by Louise Ling Edwards
A field with a lonely base
is a fish. If you want to be
traditional, start a fire.

My grandfather fell in love
learning Chinese. He asked
his teacher out to the museum.

An abundance. A cow in the middle
that is or is not a thing. The courtyard
that shifts to an ending. A gallery.

My girlfriend and I went out also
to the Metropolitan Museum
in the weeks before I left.

To the left is work. To the right
is a mouth. Don’t mix it up
with smoothed-over stone.

My grandfather fished on a solitary
rowboat. My grandmother refused
to come just to cook. Instructed:

the moon is in service. She’ll steady
every month. Rock the tides gently
or angrily. My dad refused to fish

outside of boyhood. Something raw
in slicing stomachs. I’ll never learn
to cook properly until I’ve gone

to China. My student asks me
Why are you always looking at that
fish app? Because I don’t know

what anything means. No one ever taught me
how to speak or love. Can’t lay myself bare
like Wang Xiang on the ice

asking for carp with his whole body.
I’ve just caught a stone
in my throat. An endless field

of paper. What radical is what
radical. I’m always missing
clothes and agriculture.

Where is that matchstick
when I need it most? When
the stove won’t start itself,

when it’s been months since
we’ve kissed. Why does it mean
mouth and without? Do you understand

what I’m trying to say? Did you learn
anything? Why do I have to explain again? Love
is friend and claw and cover. Traditionally

it has a heart at the center.
And just when I think I can say something
meaningful in her first language—

my girlfriend’s, my grandmother’s—
something like: To miss is a one-eyed
forest haunting a heart. Just as I return

to the states, I start losing it. There’s too much
sorrow here. Between us, we don’t have
enough words to fish out blue-green love.

Read more from Issue 22.1.

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