ode to cheese puffs. sundays in chinese school, crushing fine

orange silt, running back to the plastic jar. those words

spreading sticky sheens across our tongues: huŏ, hóng, hǎo,

courageous, we clutched erasers and spelling dictionaries

our parents gave us – covers glossed with characters

and the residual stink of dried dates. ode to the big mouth

who sat at the back, guan kai or grant whatever his crushed

name, rolled from one language to another, wiped of wings, jarring

the teacher when he threw wet balls of toilet paper into the room—

idiot boy! she shrieked, spittled, while the rest of us traced

cheese-grit dust from lunchbags into shapes of stars. a character

our chinese teacher was, telling us about old days spent in the mouth

of a garage, packing crates of oranges for shipments out west. ode

to her childhood crush: those citrus trees, gilded in firm green leaves— she

jarred slices and pickled them with her mother, peppercorn tickling

a tongue she would later use to scold us in our baggy jeans. spelling

out her name on the board in chalk, she tapped a scraggly character

with a cane: zhāng, she said, and we dutifully mouthed it back, zh, zh,

zhāng, some of us drawing zebrafish in the margins, crushing ice-water

from the bottle. on breaks, at the vending machines, we jostled one

another for a spot at the line, whispering about our teacher’s mean tongue,

worrying she’d find us here, scanning the glass case for doritos, funyuns,

spellbound by bags of fat and flour. in class, learning the characters

for mercy, or flame. on breaks, learning the slow curve of our mouths

around illicit words we thought we’d inherited, ones that crushed us

from the inside out: huài dàn, bèn dàn, zh—  jargon!

junk! our teacher would trill, have you no shame? we tongued

cuss words like creme savers. sundays in chinese school, we cast a spell.

giddy and bad, shameless and foreign, we strutted into characters

and clasped their waists, invited them in to dirty our new mouths.