Annie Christain

Annie Christain is an assistant professor of composition and ESOL at SUNY Cobleskill with poems appearing in Seneca Review, Oxford Poetry, The Chariton Review, and The Lifted Brow, among others. She received the grand prize of the 2013 Hart Crane Memorial Poetry Contest, the 2013 Greg Grummer Poetry Award, the 2015 Oakland School of the Arts Enizagam Poetry Award, and the 2015 Neil Shepard Prize in Poetry. Additional honors include her being selected for the Shanghai Swatch Art Peace Hotel Artist Residency and the Arctic Circle Autumn Art and Science Expedition Residency.

 

Dragon Ball Z Censored for an American Audience: “One Night in Beijing”

 

I seek out a woman so I can talk to her about her breasts,

and she says it’s brave of me to claim I see them.

She’s been growing flowers with her husband for years,

and she talks about the flowers like they’re the land of the dead,

like she’s afraid to get lost at midnight around them.

It’s decided it’s more acceptable for me to scrub her back.

She says: They’ll drink the blood but with flower roots in their hair.

She means her husband is tending to the flowers

while lying on his side.  I’m scrubbing her too hard but can’t stop.

Before this, I forgot dirt exists under cement roads.

To be more specific,

we’re both standing in Baihuashenchu Alley,

her back to me, no water. I’m just using a hairbrush on her back.

Harder, she screams.

Her hair takes on the quality of roots,

and I see now the tips are actually in the dirt.

How is there not any blood on her back?

But what’s in the ground is lapping up liquid.

We’re in this alley, and I see the key-maker

who’s sitting on his stool—he opens his mouth and a fly comes out.

I forgot what I did to her husband with my hands

prior to her smearing him with the paint roller.

She bends down to moan and breathe near him to simulate life.

She can travel any distance with her hair still in the soil.

I can’t get her skin tone right

after I realize she has a back where her chest should be.

When I saw her yesterday tending to the flowers with her husband

but looking at me for too long, I saw her shirt said HFIL,

but any kid can tell that it used to be HELL.

I look again, and just for a second I see a shadow

is actually a decapitated dinosaur.  This place is too much.

Are they timeless beings or just scientists who can bend light around objects?

I want to call her a gender neutral term,

so I say “elderly person,” and that feels right.

The grieving souls—wolves waiting for me at the gate

cascade up, a hideous arch. Frozen or displayed,

they end at the wall in a pile.

I am now where artists get their ideas.

She says: I picked this to be the last thing you see.

I’m not dying; I’m going to another dimension,

but I must leave everything here.

 

Continue reading

Annie Christain is an assistant professor of composition and ESOL at SUNY Cobleskill with poems appearing in Seneca Review, Oxford Poetry, The Chariton Review, and The Lifted Brow, among others. She received the grand prize of the 2013 Hart Crane Memorial Poetry Contest, the 2013 Greg Grummer Poetry Award, the 2015 Oakland School of the Arts Enizagam Poetry Award, and the 2015 Neil Shepard Prize in Poetry. Additional honors include her being selected for the Shanghai Swatch Art Peace Hotel Artist Residency and the Arctic Circle Autumn Art and Science Expedition Residency.

 

The Sect Which Pulls the Sinews: I’ve Seen You Handle Cocoons*

 

“[A man] shall not lie with another man as [he would] with a woman, it is a to’eva.”

(Leviticus 18:22)

 

Silkworm dung lines my gums for tea;

I clutch menorah for paddle.

 

                     Malka, give me mother-strength

                     to save the scrolls.

 

I could never lie with Yôhanan

as I lie with women—

 

                                       our chewing mouthparts,

   our tongues just wringed fiber.

 

My holy sparks dwell in him.

 

                                          The first time I touched a boy,

                              I glimpsed pomegranate arils in the bowl

 

     and felt beetles walk across my chest.

 

When I crushed them,

             a monstrous insect leg broke

                           forth from my midsection,

 

ready to strike me at any time—

how I discovered my nature.

 

With faith, I could have spat into my hand,

clapped, and scored myself with a knife.

 

Instead, I, the most Chinese of the Chinese Jews,

              love Silk Maker Yôhanan,

                                          who sees me as a dybbuk.

 

              It’s true I carve questions onto the bones

of a rooster during Passover

and leave my doorpost bare.

 

You bring the smell of juniper and ammonia,

he hissed at my belly while breaking his tools.

 

I burned this foreign body once to please him,

but new and stranger shoots emerged.

 

                       I imagine placing his hand there.

 

There is no Malka,

Just a mother who carved Shalom

onto my infant chest

                                     before drowning herself.

 

Carry me away, Yôhanan,

if I wind myself up in the floating Torah;

 

the sign on my hand is twisted bark,

fringe, spooned over pulp.

 

  I’ve seen you handle cocoons.

 

* First published in ICON

 

~

We Must Kill All Rats Before We Can Kill Your Rats*

 

When I’m up late mixing concrete, the little children who live inside the walls scratch out phoenix designs. I talk to myself to drown out their chants of white devil,

and never once do I mention the Revolution—only how the leaders put an end to starvation.

I explained all my problems to the apartment manager, but he just said: We must kill all rats before we can kill your rats. It’s true because the police only wiped out the local cat population after they had reached a tipping point.

To talk of starvation—my mom stopped feeding me when I was five because she was too busy sleeping with men to get free rations of chocolates and cigarettes. No wonder I ask the gods for more and more offspring—

no one pays attention to just one emaciated child.

Soon I was allowed to plug up all the rat holes in my apartment if I paid for the cement myself. Word of my strong character spread to all the parents on the block with left-over women daughters. Every mother I meet bows and gives me soft chicken bones and eggs preserved in ash and salt. I only take them because it means less food for her.

The guards told me with pride that they help all the sick mothers on my block. Just in case it’s true, I place bananas at the feet of Shiva gutting a mermaid-whore so I can convince the gods to make more mothers suffer alone.

I spend my time renovating my apartment, teaching English, shooting roosters bound to blocks of ice, or volunteering to improve society. Just yesterday Onion’s parents gave her gold earrings and pushed her into the closet where I was waiting to finally give them a grandson. I paid for those earrings myself.

Her male ancestors stood on a cloud and cheered me on with their demands for a male heir. I told her what I tell all the girls: I want to investigate your faith.

Many of these so-called cherished mothers here sleep stacked in silos that once stored rice. I shook their hands while the director of the senior center snapped some photos. The newspaper article said I was a doctor from a local medical university doing routine check-ups.

Western man monitors health of Bao Ming . . . .

Her kind won’t be safe anywhere in this world.

 

* First published in Skidrow Penthouse

Thanks to CR Press

 

 

 

 

Continue reading