Wordplay
Sophie Hilker ’20
This month, The Words is so grateful and excited to showcase the work of English minor Albert Lee ’20. Catfished from Honolulu, Hawai’i with a financial aid package, Albert Lee is a junior at Macalester College. An Asian studies major and creative writing minor, his writing is inspired by larger questions about postmemory, diasporic intimacy, and Asian-futurism. Essentially, ‘How beautiful does the world need to be before I stop wanting to leave it?’ Currently, he is reading Ocean Vuong’s intensely fragile novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. He hopes he can one day connect to the pathos within the human condition as Ocean does so tenderly.
Please enjoy Albert’s poetry!
弟弟
1. I met a boy who, at the age of 14, had the same haircut I did.
2. “Hunger is to give the body what it knows it cannot keep.” — Ocean Vuong
3. My mouth had coffee with him, and as soon as my legs got home, my lungs forgot how to breathebreathebreathebreathebreathebreathebreathebreathebreathebreathebreathe b r e a t h e
4. My hair either looks like an expired Christmas tree or an angry porcupine dipped in wax.
5. hehasanxietyhehasanxietyhehasanxietyhehasanxietyhehasanxietyhehasanxietyhehasanxietytoo
6. He tames his porcupine every morning with heavy-duty hair paste; I gave up after the second week of freshman year.
7. His belly is empty but I will not gavage him five-thousand years of regurgitated daddy issues.
8. We both used to be fatter than the Asian oompa-loompas and we’re still browner than the chocolate factory.
9. I don’t know how long I can keep promising to take care of him.
10. I went through his old Facebook photos and found pictures of myself.
11. I starve.
12. Fuck You And Your Fucking Problematic Chocolate Factory Full Of Chinky Brown Boys Who Bleed Like Him, Willy Wonkass.
13. He has a pretty, Chinese, and pretty Chinese girlfriend named Francesca.
14. I hope Fran knows how to love him before his anxiety knows how to kill.
of koiと aiと sakuraと silenceと warと warmthと loveと lossと hashiと
m Maybe it’s naïve for me to expect the world to scream
a and shoot just because another human is shot.
s Silence is not the absence of a gunshot.
s Silence is the presence of a bulletstorm.
s Sometimes, I set my hashi ablaze
h hoping someone cares,
o or at least, stays warm,
o or at least, stays.
t To be fair, I don’t usually set my hashi ablaze;
i I prefer to let it rot. When sakura blossoms in the midst of war,
n nobody can explain the difference between koi and ai. I
g guess koi is to live for love, whereas ai is to die for it?
s Shootings are koi. They either mature into ai or silence.
[originally published in the September Issue of The Write Launch]
我是别的事物 《蓝蓝》
我是我的花朵的果实。
我是我的春夏后的霜雪。
我是衰老的妇人和她昔日青春
全部的美丽。
我是别的事物
我是我曾读过的书
靠过的墙壁 笔和梳子。
是母亲的乳房和婴儿的小嘴
是一场风暴后腐烂的树叶
——— 黑色的泥土
I Am Another Thing by Lan Lan (Translated by Albert Lee)
I am the fruits of my flower.
I am the frost and snow after my spring and summer.
I am the waning woman and her once unmarried youth
in all of its beauty.
I am another thing
I am the books I once read
the walls I once leaned on the pens and the combs.
am the mother’s breast and the baby’s small mouth
am the leaves decomposing after the storm
——— black earth