Years Flow by Like Water

Abstract

Years Flow by Like Water Wo Chan (bio) flowers do yoga in the sun in ways i cannot.stretching comes difficult because it is too simple and i believe i am complex, more than i actually am.light, cool water, to be touched with intention, the permission to root and spill into a lust for plain air.when will you let somebody love you, wo chan? “I love flowers. I know that is not a radical statementbut I love loving them,” john says after i send a snapshot of the colonial garden. pine mulch, romance,the crying voluptuous bees: the world that ekes a strange, barn owl tenderness for my friend.i gasp like a new page in a calendar. july 3rd, 2018.there is much i don’t say. you can have an unimpressive sense of self:iphone 6 kissing the mouths of dayglow lilies, the punk rock daisies that wear a choker of spiked white leaves,swollen yellow heads dusty and free of the mind . . . in my childhood i knew a myth. ten brothers born to a motherwho swallowed a string of ten pearls. each child could do one incredible thing. the oldest see miles away;the third lift boulders; the fifth could fly; the sixth impenetrable. [End Page 160] seven could grow tall as a palace gate; nine could shout the walls down.the youngest brother, though, the tenth, was powerless throughout, a nuisance who wept from fear at each encounter with the villain.though who antagonized us? the bureaucrat who named us high on his sinecure? the children in sheets tapping at our gate?my brothers and i projected on this drama a schematic for boyhood where we could be mythic, incredible, and chinesein virginia’s townhouses set across from the chuck e. cheese. i was the youngest—my brothers strong, of clear sight,protected me from what i couldn’t see then, and then tormented me for my uselessness.i cried for help until i learned to stop crying. i drew blood.we opened a restaurant. we became something. my oldest brother, hot-tempered in silver hatchbackslingshotting noodles from city to suburb; the second, glamorous in peanut sheen, shifting a wok one-handedlylike a black chariot across fire; the third, lead oarman, draped in steam, all smiles near the behemoth haier. He was a child, really.I showered with him, shared a room until I was sixteen. I love them. I know that is not a radical statement,but I love loving them. I hate how we were raised, though it is done now.I think it is over. The restaurant sold to our neighbor who makes very bad food. Our parents:they are in bed and resting diabetic, sewn in varicose veins. [End Page 161] We lived through these decisions.The air is heavier than when we first arrived in the San Francisco airport, my mother staring down the wall of terminalglass that shines a vision of my brothers hauling duffels, dragging luggage and my babyish hand,already sweaty and floating through the shift home that wills to move us and will remove us from each other. [End Page 162] Wo Chan Wo Chan is a poet and drag performer. They are a winner of the 2020 Nightboat Poetry Prize and the author of Togetherness (Nightboat Books, 2022). Wo has received fellowships from MacDowell, New York Foundation of the Arts, Kundiman, and elsewhere. Their poems appear in Poetry, Wussy, the Massachusetts Review, No Tokens, and the Margins. As a member of the Brooklyn-based drag/burlesque collective Switch N’ Play, Wo has performed at the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, National Sawdust, New York Live Arts, and elsewhere. Follow their work at@theillustriouspearl. Copyright © 2022 Middlebury College