September–October 2013 • 47 bath: he is completely naked before me, unselfconsciously nude. Together we watch cartoons, The Lion King, Finding Nemo. Sometimes I tell him Moroccan stories, about my terrible young childhood , I teach him words in Arabic. We pretend to fight, sometimes for real. We cry, scream, mock each other, kindly, meanly. Each day he gets a little bigger, grows rapidly like a flower that one waters with care, with love. He grows before my astonished, wondering, happy gaze. Even when he annoys me, even when he acts like a little macho man, Tristan remains a little sun for me. The Parisian sun that will never burn my skin. I repeat in my head what he’ll say to his friends later, perhaps to his children: “When I was little, my babysitter was Moroccan, his name was Abdellah.” Three hours a day, I play a small role in his life, in his future, and that makes me proud in spite of myself. I feel like I’m accomplishing a mission with him. I accompany him. Tristan is not my son. Tristan is a little angel who sometimes cries like that, for no reason, he cries in my arms, I console him tenderly, but I never know about what. I’m envious of his innocence , his pure outlook on the world. He doesn’t know. He still doesn’t know. Ignorance is bliss! There are some truths about me and about the world that I hope are never known. I reflect too much. I complicate everything, everything. I think, I think, a permanent bottleneck in my head. Ideas and images I don’t know what to do with. I’m so tired of myself, of being me in this hurried life. I look for something that will come, that is slow in coming. I should take a step, just one more, I should renew myself, find or summon the energy. I have plans: they tell me I always must have some in order to find a daily rhythm, a connection between the visible and the invisible. The meaning of life, of my life, escapes me. Others seem to be happy. Are they truly happy? What makes them happy? Why do they know where to go and I don’t? My name is Abdellah: the slave, the servant of God. I freed myself from Morocco’s constraints (but really?). All that remains is to escape myself. I looked for loneliness. I found it, and it’s insufferable. I’m permanently myself, unable to forget who I am. My consciousness of my being has accrued over time. An anguished consciousness . I know what’s happening inside myself, my Inside America Nicholas YB Wong Irony is I count corners to survive. Leaking turns of a tub, a door wedge near a cobweb. I count on them. How interesting lifts are faithful only to the vertical. A sign says When there’s a lift life breakdown, press the button. Release. Speak – My pet moth dismantles its wings at dawn, my desire to leave a trace meanders where flight feeds on legs. I’m warm, wear low-cut socks. My shoes to cross thresholds, borders and minds are kept indoors, like shame, that smells fresh, like sashimi. Call me faggot I can’t swim anyway, my firecracker vines grow sideway like drowning octopi upside down. My German memento says Glűck, but moments always are too big to be framed. I want simple, but details begin. Fetishes are simply details. I collect AA batteries. I carry a torch in broad daylight. Nicholas YB Wong received his MFA at the City University of Hong Kong and is a finalist of the New Letters Poetry Award. His second poetry collection is forthcoming from Kaya Press in fall 2014. He is on the editorial board of Drunken Boat and Mead: Magazine of Literature and Libations. Corgis are his favorite human breed. beating heart, beating unevenly on occasion, my ears whistling, blood sometimes hot, sometimes cold, the air that produces a strange music while entering and leaving my nostrils, my cracking bones, my changing skin, the feuding ideas in my head, the jostling images in my eyes, and...