Lunchbreak Zuihitsu
I yank my body from the hanger. Hold it
in front of the sun to see it mottled with sickness. We call this office
architecture “田”-shaped. As in crops dried in a field of cubicles. As in cages.
Noon crackles on glass. Light slits through
scaffolding. Bodies of misshapen hounds slurried
into a crowd. Prowls for some bit of paradise. The hunt for subsistence at second wake. Hunger
is a primal urge. Hunger is human.
Dress shirts in Queens Road, crimped at the collar like broken necks. Woman on her knees
by the bin. Can’t you tell? She is all our grandmothers, digging for some God. I’ve forgotten
the Cantonese word for ‘shame’.
The food was fine. We ate out of the same styrofoam box. Wolves too aware
of the concept of scarcity. Sharing or competing for the morsels?
Gulps of lukewarm gossip. Pork chops with onions and ketchup torn by teeth.
Someone throws me a red-feral smile. Calls me gullible for not taking kindness as bait.
Loose language rattles in a throat. Resistance brimming in heat
mounted bodies. Shoulders touching in the diner is the closest thing we know of kin.
Minds suckle on the brittle idea of being.
A freshly baked pineapple bun glows in the distance. Our dreams
brining in all our cramped corners. We sweat them away. The cool breath of aircon
at our throats, learns to kill. Learns how to break a neck.
I prune into a business card. I give it away.
How much does otherness cost? What is the currency of time? Wai Julia Cheung is a poet from Hong Kong, currently living in Boston, contemplating the transactional absurdity and alienation in our day to day living. Perpetually in conflict with herself, she struggles with the distances between the voices she embodies – e.g. working in both corporate and corporage, she’s in the process of figuring out what’s corpo-real. Her poetry has appeared in the expanse of her journal-musings, in pockets of loved ones, and probably in the indecipherable mumblings of a half-thought by the Charles River. You will likely find her overthinking, or on her website: https://on-lunchbreak.com/.
