Husband One Looks To Me For Confirmation, No Doubt Skeptical Of The Party Line. These Days, Only Fools

Husband One looks to me for confirmation, no doubt skeptical of the party line. These days, only fools speak freely among strangers. I nod yes, but do not elaborate. What do I care about the dilution of our blood and the increasing complexity of our society when my most basic need for a wife and child is not met?

An Excess Male by Maggie Shen King. Harper Voyager. 2017. 

A dystopian novel depicting the consequences of China’s infamous One Child Policy and traditional preference for male heirs, An Excess Male is the poignant, deceptively matter-of-fact debut novel of Taiwan-born author and current San Francisco Bay Area resident Maggie Shen King. 

Over 40 million eligible bachelors find themselves without wives and abilities to pass down family names to children, one of the most crucial parts of patriarchal marriage customs, leading to the creation of Advanced Families with a hierarchy of multiple husbands for one woman. Wei-guo meets May-ling, aspiring to be her Husband Three after establishing a mutual rapport and comfort he had never felt with anyone else. The complex intersections between politics and love, state and family, and patriotism and belief climax as Wei-guo faces challenges, rebellion, and the quaking boldness of personal resolve. 

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I’ve stopped being sorry for all my soft. I won’t apologise because I miss you, or because I said it, or because I text you first, or again. I think everyone spends too much time trying to close themselves off. I don’t want to be cool or indifferent, I want to be honest. If I love you at 5AM, I’d damn well rather that you know I felt it. If I love you two hours later, I’ll tell you then too. Listen, I won’t wait double the time it takes for you to text me back because I don’t want to. I don’t care enough to be patient with you. I’m happy, you made me feel that way, don’t you want to know? So that’s how it’s going to be. I’m going to leave myself as open as a church door. And I’m going to wake you up before the crack of dawn to tell you that I’m fucking joyful, no pretending, not from me, not ever. Would you like some coffee, would you please kiss me? Here, these are my hands, this is my mouth, it is all yours.

Azra.T “Don’t Wait Three Days to Text First.” (via goodquoteco)

follow for more poems on instagram >> Jinan Safko

souvlaki space station

there is nothing tethering us to this weightless existence, bodies drifting into an astral lightness that lasts just short of six minutes. dream song that we slow dive to, with our heads tilted towards the sky; and in this temporary eternity all i taste is air unfenced and alive. our hands reach out to catch the night-coloured echoes, only for them to slip through our fingers, diffusing into hazy memories of a time not forgotten, nor remembered.

(a little poem i wrote based on the song souvlaki space station as a homage to my favourite band in the world)

People are art. Their skin a soft canvas of creases and bumps and stretch marks you’ve never felt, each telling their own story. Their freckled stained eyes, a constellation the skies could only dream of creating. And all of their movements, even the slightest ones, like a taking a breath of air suddenly become poetic.

Never had there been a time when sound, color, and feeling hadn’t been intertwined, when a dirty, rolling bass line hadn’t induced violets that suffused him with thick contentment, when the shades of certain chords sliding up to one another hadn’t produced dusty pastels that made him feel like he was cupping a tiny, golden bird. It wasn’t just music but also rumbling trains and rainstorms, occasional voices, a collective din. Colors and textures appeared in front of him, bouncing in time to the rhythm, or he’d get a flash of color in his mind, an automatic sensation of a tone, innate as breathing.

The Leavers by Lisa Ko. 2017. 

One morning, eleven-year-old Deming Guo’s undocumented mother Polly leaves for her job at a nail salon. She never comes home. Deming is adopted by two white professors who rename him “Daniel Wilkinson” and attempt to mold him into a truly “American” boy. Lyrically poignant and bitingly raw, Lisa Ko’s debut novel The Leavers exhumes themes of family and community, intergenerational emotion, and the oft-erased brutality of the immigrant experience. 

Told from the perspective of a growing child, it is at once a bitterly tender bildungsroman and a reflection of structural sociopolitical faultlines in a jarringly torn family. Though Deming’s tale could have been overlaid with heavy themes of immigration and despairing politics, Ko centers the narrative around the child who’s lost a parent—at the end of the day, the perplexity, gravity, and irreconcilable belief of being left and lost is the focus of this elastic, penetrative story.

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