Cynthia Dewi Oka
A tall man wipes ashes from his lips. “I’ll pay you,”

he says. “If you’re worthy.” From the lamp of his skull, a steeple
rises. Roaches seek warmth in the dead bells, while cherry

blossoms burst their green corsets. My mother at the end

of a 12-hour shift at the factory will heat rice-and-vegetable soup,
cooked last weekend and kept frozen to last her six working

days, to eat while watching reruns of The Good Wife.

She does not always understand what Julianna Margulies is
saying. Sometimes she weeps because memory is long and

bendy, a red line that curves around the globe instead of

cutting through the center. It begins on a piece of rock
represented on the globe by a bump under the fingertip. A body

at the bottom of a well. Which is a good place—if

someone’s kid could lower a piece of mackerel down to you
in a pail, twice a day, cleaned of its bones. Strange how

expensive rice was then with so many bodies in

the river, puddles, trailing their red ribbons. When I told
my mother I was going to start organizing workers, she

slapped me with the same hand that used to soothe the long,

bumpy scar on my father’s chest. I have to make time to cry, and
eat. Fuck that kamikaze shit. It was not just from grief that

shocks of hair fell from my head to the kitchen floor. I wore

four-sizes-too-big-but-ironed jeans for the better part of high
school and threatened kids by thumbing a knife across

the skin of an orange because my parents believed even

an ordinary man of no particular feat or achievement could
be brought back to life when God wanted to prove

a point. In other words, there could be a universal language

in whose syntax fire is not a country. Sometimes, it’s like I’m almost
there. Some mornings, smoking, I lock eyes with the squirrel

perched, perfectly still, on the lip of the garbage bin. I

picture its soft, little lungs, flaring like a dahlia. It’s true, my
mother refused to howl like the dog they called her; my father once

glowed. Inside, there is a desk, and on it, a flower head made

of paper. It says Mom. It has six petals around it that
unfold, a list of possible destinies—

You take great care of me.
You cook for everyone.
You hear what I have to say.
You always cheer me up.
You love me.
You are the best.

—and a wire stem wrapped around the frame of a faded photograph:

a man with thinning hair and jutting cheekbones, his arm around
a girl, six or seven, in a traditional yellow kebaya. The drawn

curtains behind them admit no stones. Her eyes squint, she is

smiling. Mouth small. Red, like a liar’s word.
from the book FIRE IS NOT A COUNTRY / TriQuarterly Books
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I wanted to work through contradictions around the permanence of labor, particularly feminized labor, and the contingency of value. How do I make sense of the idea of personal worth with so much evidence against it in my own experience, in the generations of people I come from? The poem is shadowed by the 1965 anti-Communist mass killings in Indonesia, which targeted union members, peasants, writers, and ethnic Chinese.
 
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Robert Bly Dies at 94

"'One day while studying a Yeats poem I decided to write poetry the rest of my life,' he wrote. 'I recognised that a single short poem has room for history, music, psychology, religious thought, mood, occult speculation, character and events of one’s own life.'"

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What Sparks Poetry:
Devon Walker-Figueroa on Jorie Graham's "Salmon"

"This was a language not so much spoken as felt from deep within … and it made me, all at once, begin to ask myself new questions: what are the choreographies by which our consciousness might move—the patterns in which astonishments congregate? Can the poet witness her own inception? What tempos might our impressions take up—only to shed them later on?"
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