This Way to the Sugar

by Hieu Minh Nguyen

  I don’t know his name. He could be my father,

  but is not my father

  since he is white, and here,

  and easily impressed

  by the way I roll my neck.

  This is not a dream. Don’t pinch me.

  I won’t tell you how I survived the wreckage.

  This story doesn’t leave the ocean floor.

  This story went away, bleached

  clean. In an earlier version

  that man became a girl,

  and then, years later, a creature.

  Tentacles dripping with grease, glowing

  white eyes.

  Am I lying again? The opposite

  of helpful is not helpful,

  which a life raft would be. I don’t need to be saved.

  The opposite of touch is bleeding. The ocean swallows

  all the colors, and will never stop

  trying to get inside my body.In the current

  draft I tell: he becomes a man again,

  and then a man shriveled

  when met with salt.

  TEACHER’S PET

  I ride the bus the entire way

  with the cold peaches sweating

  in my upturned shirt. The fruit rolls

  across the table and onto her office floor.

  An apple, though a tougher breed,

  would have been too cliché. I hand her the one

  I believe to be the sweetest, the one opened

  by the carpet’s rough skin. Peeling the sugared

  meat from the ground like separating a wound

  from a gauze bandage, I raise the borderless fruit

  to her mouth, holding it above my head, a gift

  already unwrapped. She buries her face into my

  small palms and slurps the juice, the syrup

  dripping into my hair. Her clean fist wipes

  the gloss from her chin and a small boy

  stuck to the back of her hand.

  HALLOWEEN, 14

  Of course it was a bad idea

  sending my address

  to that headless gentleman—

  jack-o-lantern’s smile, out of frame,

  assumed he would come on a dark horse,

  not unlike a prince. I invited him over

  while mother slept in the next room,

  exhausted from hiding in our dark house

  when the neighbor kids, who tonight,

  covered themselves in blood

  and pretended it was a costume, drummed

  with laughter while they pissed

  on our lightless porch—round here

  we don’t pass out candy, round here

  you ask your neighbor for a cup of sugar

  and she hands you her newborn—

  don’t you dare give it back. Don’t

  you dare try to coddle it into silence.

  You let it cry and cry until it grows

  up and urinates on your mother’s

  basil, until the whole goddamn street

  glows and smells of burning bags

  of shit, or at least that’s the smell

  I remember when I think of that night,

  think of darkness being watered

  thin, think of that man, who sat

  in his humming car for three hours

  chain-smoking, headlights pointed

  towards my bedroom window, calling

  and calling, whispering some name I forgot

  I’d given him, waiting for a bloodless boy

  to come out from hiding.

  II

  “Would it be possible to find a more ungrateful boy,

  or one with less heart than I have?”

  — Carlo Collodi, Pinocchio

  THE OCEAN, MAYBE

  He didn’t expect me to be that fat,

  didn’t anticipate the extra weight

  he had to carry. But since I am

  already here and warm enough

  to cradle a pulse in a wilting man,

  since the moon is waning (or waxing,

  never could tell, really) on the other side

  of the city, since the dogs snarling and barking

  in the doorway have stopped and grown

  accustomed to my scent, since the buses

  will stop running soon, and the other men,

  by now, will be too drunk to drive, or hold

  an erection, since I’ve made an attempt

  to look at least halfway decent, to be more

  than pixels, since my body is a sea,

  a good sea, the ocean, maybe,

  since I’ve trained my mouth to suck

  the bullets out of dead men,

  I don’t have to learn his name,

  since I am, after all, a grain of glass

  on a waterline, cutting open

  his eyes every time he blinks.

  TEACHER’S PET

  Know: I am somewhat grateful for this body, this ugly,

  this slow metabolism, and these layers and layers.

  I am not saying

  I’d be beautiful thinner—I tried that already, got plenty of affection

  from that woman with the smudged face and melting fingers,

  those claw marks

  that rise to the surface of all these stretched cells. I have built myself

  a safer body, covered the rot with rot. Sometimes I can hear that little boy

  I tucked away,

  lost in this new house, gasping for breath, or another meal, or her,

  the woman that held our name in her mouth like a Eucharist wafer,

  or a wet god,

  and maybe praying was enough, maybe the scars weren’t necessary

  to ward off spirits from this secondhand husk. Something wicked

  has occupied me

  for years, wallpaper dressed in bitter smoke, a chandelier

  of unbrushed teeth, a school of birds picked and pecked,

  upturned the lawn,

  until I woke up holding a pair of scissors and a fist

  clenching the parts of me that had already died,

  there’s no need

  to eradicate this vessel of shadows. Lightning

  won’t strike twice on a vandalized house.

  IT WAS THE MORNING HE DISCOVERED CHICKEN BONES UNDER MY PILLOW, OR IT WAS THE NIGHT I DRANK, AND DRANK, AND DRANK UNTIL I FINALLY FOUND MY KEYS AT THE BOTTOM OF LAKE HARRIET

  Bellyache humming a dull

  sailor’s tune. Boy with sugar

  in his tank. The organ,

  the origin, life-sized and growing

  legs, growing fever and a dry

  sense of humor. Laughing

  and clutching a gut, a headboard,

  another boy’s genitals. Another god

  to blame for a sleepless night.

  A body filling with ghost stories,

  gutted by mood lighting. A house

  filling with a magician’s dirty laundry.

  What privilege to smell sulfur

  and assume candles?

  The heat was supposed to break

  a month ago—wait for it…nope.

  Still hot, still thick and graceless,

  smoke still in midair. Still here.

  Two weeks facedown in the mud.

  Drunk—at least I think we are.

  Lovesick—I’m sure we’re not

  the only ones starving. Some myth,

  right? Some god, right? Take this body

  and see a body, where so many see a grave.

  Come! See: the ugliest mouth

  on both sides of the Mississippi.

  CHOKE

  Perhaps my body would make more sense

  if you cut it open. A door that swings

  at the throat. Your lap stripping

  the wet carpet of my mouth, prying loose

  the marble tiles. Tell me if you know

  an affordable magician with hands

  steady enough to sever a torso and conj
ure,

  from this heaving carcass, the rabbit’s bones.

  If I say: your father taught me how to smile

  a real man’s width, I would be lying, though

  I’m almost certain he had a child. There is a boy

  wailing in the distance, but that too could be me,

  or my hunger, which rises with every person

  it swallows. My cheeks swell

  with sand, and I close my mouth,

  and there’s no other exit, no way out,

  just some man spreading his light

  at the end of the tunnel.

  TEACHER’S PET

  When you remember her face

  for the first time in ten years,

  you are across the aisle from a man

  who looks nothing like her,

  but somehow you recall the night

  she came to your house

  and how she flinched

  when your mother thanked her

  for dropping off your backpack.

  Think back to the way you felt

  when she called other children

  to her office, how relief was a house

  painted green. Remember the way

  she recoiled when you called her

  mommy, or how she kissed

  your forehead before you boarded

  the bus, on your way back home.

  DRY

  When I warned my mother

  about the mold starting to grow

  along the bathroom tiles,

  she simply put a rug over it.

  She ignored it for months.

  Engulfed by a storm

  cloud, the pink shag began

  to transform. Soon lost in the skin

  of a wild animal, the tiles became

  the gray scales of a dragon,

  but my mother kept on ignoring

  the smoke, the bullet holes

  in the toilet tank, the masked man

  behind the shower curtain.

  Have you heard of the boys

  who turn wolf in moonlight?

  Or the women who turn mother

  at the foot of a hospital bed?

  Such careless children

  to let the piercing get infected

  to the point of amputation.

  To cover the scab with a fucking rug.

  When the men came in white

  to gut our porcelain wound, she blamed me

  for it all, the leather-coated ceramic, the bill,

  the spores reupholstering my lungs with wool.

  NOURISH

  I see the boy gleaming underneath the neighbor’s

  motion detectors, face cut

  with the clothesline’s shadow, like his mouth

  is frothing with tar,

  or blueberries, or maybe that’s what hunger looks like,

  like a forty-minute drive,

  like gas money, and I want to ask him how much he spent

  to get here, so I can offer half, or at least

  know how much I am worth, so later, when he’s pulling out

  my spine with whatever instrument

  makes the least amount of noise, I can gauge the right amount

  of soap and boil, or maybe just lay

  in its filth, like that dinner table with the plates rusting over,

  how I promised to clear it last week,

  but just fell asleep on the couch with my pants unbuttoned.

  THE DOCK

  No one wants to go near the lake

  that swallowed two more boys

  this year. Sad story, yes, but we’re thankful

  to have a pretty place to be discreet.

  Not saying a basement can’t be pretty,

  and don’t get me wrong, I am a fan

  of the mass-produced hotel art,

  the same photo hanging above each bed

  makes it easier to pretend each new room

  is still our room, makes me crave a life

  of dull decor and basic cable, makes my mouth

  water, really. I bite the lips off of a Styrofoam cup

  and spit them at the ducks that swim past.

  Wait. Don’t eat that. Fuck.

  This is the first time I hear him laugh out loud.

  With him, there are few noises I can recognize.

  A fly lands on his cheek and I try to brush it

  away, but before my hand can cast

  a shadow on the bridge of his nose,

  the fly burrows into him. He doesn’t flinch,

  just winks—and now there’s one on his knee,

  and another lands in his dimple, one on each

  eyelid. There are hundreds now, all digging

  or moving underneath his skin, all bubbling

  behind that firm smile. His eyes begin

  to vibrate, and he doesn’t reach for me. He doesn’t

  need me here, really. I am no expert, or exorcist,

  or great love. I am just another boy sitting

  an arm’s length away from someone he doesn’t recognize

  in the light. He opens his mouth and they all fly out,

  not a swarm, but a single-file line, a thin braid of black

  hair, the longest exhale from a sinking car—that’s it.

  There. That’s the noise I’m so familiar with.

  DEAR FRIEND

  for JD

  It’s another winter

  I’ve refuse to wear mittens,

  and still my hands are here—

  tell me again of the cold

  that far north of daylight,

  or sing me a song

  I will never make the effort

  to understand.

  Do you tell the story of us?

  The boy you found digging

  a hole in a whale’s back,

  or is it the clean version

  where you drive across the country

  just to be disappointed

  by the ocean, or you drive

  across the country just to think

  about calling? If the tale starts

  in winter, then you are already gone.

  I tell you I am happy,

  and you tell me you are happy,

  and I am told I’m supposed to

  hate you, since hate is the body

  that stays when love leaves,

  but by now that skin has a new name,

  and if the story of us begins

  in summer, then I’m the one who left.

  I’m the one who buried everything

  that had a face.

  THE GAY 90S, MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA, 18+

  after Sierra DeMulder

  This is where the straight people go

  to watch The Gays. They come

  wearing pride and proud in fishnet

  costumes. They come to watch the main event

  of smoke and sweat and mirrors.

  We are your #1 fans! They have all come

  to The Show: See the Cock Swallower.

  The Dancing Bears. Come watch those Strong

  Women. The Married Men

  all cramming into one bathroom stall.

  Bring a beard and a moist towelette.

  It’s a five-dollar cover. It’s a good time. Tip

  the bartender,

  smile for the cameras, twirl for the fire.

  The audience is watching. They are waiting

  for you to do a trick.

  AT THE SUPERMARKET

  I find my mother’s shopping cart in the middle of the aisle with her nowhere in sight, purse still in the cart, eggs crushed underneath soup cans. She is not in this aisle or the next or the one with the deodorant. When I hear a pyramid of jars collapse, I look for her clumsy hands. I am disappointed to find a small child standing in a pool of green juice. Ugh. Where are your parents, kid? A scream from the checkout lane, a stampede of grapefruits, all belonging to someone else. My voice, a hot stone curdling the dairy, the creamer, that lady’s breast. A kind strang
er helps me call for her. He doesn’t know he is saying the Vietnamese word for mother. He assumes that he is saying a child’s name. This makes her more important. This makes her hunger a room filling with sand, her world darker, slicked with ice and sharp edges. The bathrooms are a hopeless and empty playground. The parking lot, a scatter of mothers with bumper sticker faces. The children, packed meat, all squeaking their cellophane song. This way to the sugar. This way to the dairy. Aisle four aisle five six seven bakery meat deli. And of course just like that, just like traffic, or magic, or winter, she is there, cradling a watermelon like a ball that rolled and just kept on rolling, until it stopped at the lips of a cave or a strange man or a semi truck. She drops the watermelon into the cart, on top of the tomatoes.

  CHRISTMAS EVE, 17

  The only goodnight kiss I would

  receive came from the bright burst

  of headlights as he backed out

  of the hotel parking lot. Each raw

  knee, puffy with the negative imprints

  of the carpet’s braided teeth. Only the sink

  has hot water. No point in showering

  when sweat is no longer sweat. You can

  no longer see his pulse’s splatter across

  the palette. The paint is a different color

  when it dries. It’s like he was never here.

  The gift was rewrapped. A garland

  of meat, unstrung. The glass is full.

  Again. Again. The mouth, a clean

  gutter. The body, a buffed wall.

  This never happened. The botched

  deconstruction, tooth by tooth,

  each growing back. Smile

  digging its way out of a pink grave.

  Everything is fine. Nothing is gone.

  DIFFUSE

  Their arms reaching overme, like a bridge,

  or a tightrope over some electric pool. Finger-diving

  into each other’s backs.I am still

  fully dressed, and maybe I’m a prude,

  or maybe I thought

  some eager mouth would find me.

  I guess

  that’s what I get for thinking of myself half-full,

  or even water at all, or even cold. Y’know

  you’re not supposed to

  be cold. Not with this many people

  in a bed. When they finally notice me

  kissing their shoulders,

  like a dog eating

  off the dinner table, they both kiss me.