I.

City I hardly knew and how could I
know you now: gunmetal boulevards
luxury malls for faces only like mine
your prayers                   are silenced
by armed men           standing guard
on every corner         in every crowd.

In the name of false fathers prosperity
is security             is sentinel high rises
iris scans   gene sequence barbed wire
the         new         Chinese          dream
blood type is ideology     data is despot.

II.
In this city whose name is a tumble of
scree,
I circle old town lanes in search of
something whole,
something holy
and see the pink bedspread,
the potted geranium,
a child’s hung dress
in a house razored open—
raze a home,
raze the heart.

Yet a city breathes beneath the skin
of this other city,
where girls with perfect brows
chatter all tongues and no fear
sipping glass pot tea sweetened
with jujubes.

III.
Daughter of rawap, daughter
of cadres, Pari drives a disco car:
plush pink seats, rapid pulse of synth
and bass. Tailing through a red light sea
we build our own city in this Lexus
in a slurry of three tongues.

I want to tell her that my country
is a melting pot, a massacre
of new frontiers and boarding schools,
long centuries of shackled dreams,
but I know that in her country
mine is the oppressor’s face.

Sleet against the windshield,
she catches my eye, I see her
and she sees me, and suddenly
we are one—she and I—
I do not mean I speak for her;
what I mean is:

this is the city that I know.

Contributor Notes

Grace H. Zhou is a poet and cultural anthropologist living in Oakland, California. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Frontier Poetry, AAWW's The Margins, Kweli, The Hellebore and elsewhere. She is a PhD candidate at Stanford University and an alumna of Tin House Workshops and Kearny Street Workshop's Interdisciplinary Writers Lab. You can find her online at www.gracehzhou.com