Joanna Deng

Pacific Mail

I am filled with the kind of hunger that clings to fish hooks
so technically I am anything but starving.
I let the basin-boned man next to me
eat the frost-beaten bread in my pockets

because just looking at the ocean
is enough to flood
my stomach.

He is about twice my age
and is more gaunt yellow than alive
so when he leans against the bulwark,
eyes glassy and skin scaled,
instead of sleeping,
I offer to sing him a song.

Maybe if he remembers
where a voice exists in the body,
he will beat out whatever he has
that they say just keeps on taking
and taking.

When we wake the next morning
I learn that sorrow spills into anything that stays silent,
finding itself in the limpness of his empty body,
and a part of me wishes
I had eaten the bread I snuck
onto the ship instead.

I spend two more nights
in the comfort of a corpse
(or really many I probably cannot see)
humming until
one of the thousand other bodies
still breathing
tells me to shut the fuck up.

Someone else whispers
that I am still too young
to sell my life away
for the gluttony of America.

I do not feel like telling him
that I have no problem
holding our language under my tongue
and waiting for the day it will
bite me back.

I do not feel like telling him
I split my lips to leave
a blistered kitchen and traded
my Ma’s warmth for a pair of carp eyes.

When I sidle up next to a group of men
smoking off the balcony of the steamship
and ask them for a cigarette
they call me “小鬼”

so for 60 days in this mid-19th century
I write songs only for the blue-bitten
because
the dead don’t tell me I am out of tune.

When we finally peek at the port
of the golden gates in the horizon,
I remember how my father taught me how to fish
in the lake of our backyard
before he died in the trek through the famine.

I follow his directions,
haul myself up from the deck,
and get ready to lie
under the glassy flat
of a new country’s lake

waiting
for a merchant marine to find me
or until there is something big to bite.

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Joanna Deng is a Chinese American writer based in Boca Raton, Florida. She is an alumna of the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio and her work has been recognized nationally by YoungArts and the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. In favor of the odd and the new, you can find her taping bandaids on her feet before ballet class or putting bacon into cookies in her free time.