Inhabitance

Late fall, the air still moist and slightly sweet
goes unnoticed. Want rockfish or tilapia?
his father asks. It’s Friday after lunch
and they’ve gone to the local Asian market
in the once-night-blue van. To the boy, the question’s
prosaic: a choice of lean and nutty-sweet 
or delicate with oily flakes. His father
will steam them equally: brined in cooking wine,
with ginger and scallions sliced in fine and neat 
diagonals then stuffed where guts once were.
Inside a hunger stirs as the boy recalls
his father waving coupons stamped in red
and yellow: he was forced to farm for two
years in the 70s in Shanghai, where oil and rice
were rationed, meat and eggs too lavish. No choice.
Before dinner, the boy will peer beyond
the blinds to see hands cracked with discipline
watering chives and squash in modest light.
Those tireless hands that saved so much to make
and shape his American Dream: a day
to take his son to buy what fish he pleases.
And so the boy responds, rockfish will do.

Wu Wei

A wide ribbon of morning enters
leaving the lamplight
useless. The warmth
bathes the room wholly with focus,

and from the slate gray chair
I breathe     lift      leave the material world
with Zhuang Zi whose words
taut and timeless have left me late

for the dentist to fill the slow
void I’ve let be
in my teeth, skipping
in centerless circles to put on pants. 

ALAN YAN

Alan Yan is a poet based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.