The Shape of a House
The Fire Eater
My parents used to hold my finger
over a house in an English picture book
and said, This is a house. I never knew
if they were teaching me a new language
or how easy it was to shape a dream
with an index finger. Years later
I made a square with broken matchsticks, their ends
barely touching. My finger makes small
circles in the air mimicking
dove-grey smoke on a fictitious
suburban street lined
with childish quadrangles.
No inverted “v” for a roof,
no three-sided rectangle on top
awaiting animation.
Our thought bubbles redacted
by half-opened vertical blinds.
We learn to frame our space
with radio static and zigzag
lightning. They prick our fingers
but at last the house has a yellow
glow like the moon -- a stage for
rehearsing happiness. At my desk
my hand traces the over-
completed shape of a childhood
geometry. It balances on a tangent
slowly retreating…
I miss everything in the old story book -
its musty smell, the happiness found
in a new language, where love and simple
sentences reside, unbound by space.
I pull out the remaining matches from the box,
wonder if there is enough
to make a pet dog.
Someone has to do it. Someone has to dive
into the sewage in the city’s heart
to remove debris of dead relationships.
Someone will have to hold
breath and wade through tarry stool
gritting teeth against the bitter iron taste,
and suppress the urge
to write a poem about it. Someone at the circus
will have to make a call to strangers
8 hours a day, while someone has to be an aerialist
trembling with fear of height and
linearity. Someone will sleep
knowing they will never be
the one to ride a unicycle
towards the ceiling, or to learn to fly across
eaves of garrets and penthouses
with arms spread. At night, someone
has to hunt with a can of Coke
filled with alcohol poured from discarded
liquor bottles, ready to spit fire into the cloudless sky.
Everyday you eat fire in order to spit fire to build
hope and believe in the good intention of smoke -
fireballs shoot up from the tower to illuminate
those who stay behind and choose to endure
tear gas disguises as smog. You choose to leave
and speak another language in the fire
spitting city such as this one; to be
an acrobat leaping to hang a star in the sky.
Someone will have to look up
and wait for you to fall
to complete the cycle;
to see how the fire
eats the star
while making
as little sound
as possible
Wing Yau is a Hong Kong-born poet whose work appears in Peril Magazine, Cordite Literary Review, Eunoia Review, Mascara Literary Review and more. Wing is now based in Melbourne, Australia.
