Jane Yeh

You don't return my calls. In a month of missing days
Everything thwarts me, even the curls of my hair freeze;

My skin sheds, leaving flakes on my wool sweater. We are erratic
Both, changing with the weather, but you think of it

As an astronomical progression. Last year you called me
Your little sunflower. Eleven blizzards later I think of how

To get you: calculating mercury, sighting along constellations,
Rehearsing the lines of a paid assassin—not know me, my Lord?

You cannot choose! I bide time,
Hoarse-tongued and blue as poison, the double

Line of my eyes gone to slits. I hate like a tooth hurts,
At the root. I will startle the bones

From their sockets, they will crack like glass
And catch in your throat. I will dazzle

Your heart from its cage. The lungs will knock and clap
Together in the empty place. The applause will make you rattle
...

‘What do you mean by beauty?' In the Grosvenor Gallery
In our ‘mediæval' dresses, in our rapt and utterly

Fashionable gazes, we cannot touch
The isinglass wall of these

Damned unprofitable lives. What it is
That wrecks us—
I was lying
In the garden, up against the barrier

The mandragora were twined like thin fingers.
Sometimes I pose when no-one is there.

Please God I am a creature of habit and well-fed. A puzzle
Like a door in a hedge that is made of hedge, inscrutable.

What it is that is wrong in me—
When one glove in a pair is turned inside-out
It becomes the same as the other one, but with the seams exposed.

Nobody wants to see that.
Here is a conjuror's trick:

I the disappearing girl. Look again and I turn up back in the box,
Same as before. I have not got anywhere.

Why am I, why am I caught
In the hinge of this world and it presses me, where was the wrong turn

Taken took me to the middle of the maze and gave
Me this head, these hands, this beast's face?
...

The romance of the world washed over me.
My heart swelled with positive feelings, not œdema.
The forklift out the window beeped I LUV U in Morse code.

A curious pigeon molested my birdfeeding contraption.
I pined longingly for my absent biscuits, which had been eaten last week.
Even the unfriendly cat sensed the fragility of the moment
And refrained from licking its bits. How sweet

It was to breathe the sausage-scented air, and feel
The throb of the washing machine like a second heart
Keeping me true. In the garden a host of petunias dangled
And waved their skinny limbs. Oh darlings,

Some days are painted with high-saturation pigment, some
Are faint as a blueprint seen from space—today the bees
Are droning a hosanna to wish me bonne journée.

It's ridiculous to be so full of honey for a living.
It's ridiculous how ardently the washing machine sings.
Dear pigeon, I used to be a heretic from the world—
Then romance washed over me. I think I might believe
...

They eat four-cheese pizzas with three of the cheeses removed.
They make friendship bracelets out of aluminium foil and poison.
They open windows just by thinking about opening windows.
They take ballet lessons to improve the speed of their circular arm movements.

The ninjas are coming, coming to save us from muggers
And disorganised thieves and slobs who want to kill us.
The way to spot a ninja is to look for someone wearing black pyjamas—
Preternaturally neat black pyjamas—with a hood for cover.

The way to tell one ninja from another is by the ankles.
The way to tell one ninja from another is you can't.
They know how to levitate by thinking about birds' feet.
They make terrible cater waiters because no-one can hear them coming.

Their mission is to save us from chaos with their acute tumbling skills
And their climbing proficiency. They don't want to dismember
Bad jazz musicians or art teachers or con men, but they will.
They know how to escape from a trap by running in place very, very fast.

They can change places with each other by thinking about numbers.
They turn themselves into fog to get out of attending boring parties.
They make single-serving Lancashire hotpots to show their culinary mastery.
They take turns doing the laundry. (It's easy: no whites or colours.)

The ninjas are here to help us. They are as ruthless as history
Or defenestration. They are pitiless as a swarm of bees, or evolution.
They know how to throw fireballs and do their own taxes.
They hate litter and small children. They are here to fix us
...