"The Medicine Cabinet" by Hailey Stumpo
Sheng Kao | Watching Happy Together in Taipei
after Aria Aber
I sat in a dark theater unmoored from my body
and the city around me. Summoning visions
of the past without evincing nostalgia: an impossible errand.
Leslie Cheung's hands, scraped and bound,
make the body precious, a fragile site.
I, too, am at my most tender after injuring myself.
To wield one’s wound as evidence of survival
is to triumph in the smallness
of a bruised pear. Hold me
in that green kitchen; in that dilapidated house.
I am without an axis. I am hollow like a needle.
Who could I fault but myself for my own careless loving?
I had also gone to the other side of the world
in order to hear the polyphony of birds,
the way their songs reverberated across the water.
The sea, our perimeter and our threshold, a dark mirror divining
a wingless future. My father once told me,
I never thought I'd live in a place as beautiful as this.
The mountains rising like the vertebrae of green whales.
The coherent verdure of the summits and the sea.
In Taipei I saw gray towers surrounded by graves
being swallowed by mountains.
I thought, I can't believe I'm living in a place
this beautiful. Even now I refuse
to look beauty in the face.
It's the way I am beholden to my fear.
I find familiar what has been estranged from me.
I sat in a dark theater unmoored from my body
and the city around me. Summoning visions
of the past without evincing nostalgia: an impossible errand.
Leslie Cheung's hands, scraped and bound,
make the body precious, a fragile site.
I, too, am at my most tender after injuring myself.
To wield one’s wound as evidence of survival
is to triumph in the smallness
of a bruised pear. Hold me
in that green kitchen; in that dilapidated house.
I am without an axis. I am hollow like a needle.
Who could I fault but myself for my own careless loving?
I had also gone to the other side of the world
in order to hear the polyphony of birds,
the way their songs reverberated across the water.
The sea, our perimeter and our threshold, a dark mirror divining
a wingless future. My father once told me,
I never thought I'd live in a place as beautiful as this.
The mountains rising like the vertebrae of green whales.
The coherent verdure of the summits and the sea.
In Taipei I saw gray towers surrounded by graves
being swallowed by mountains.
I thought, I can't believe I'm living in a place
this beautiful. Even now I refuse
to look beauty in the face.
It's the way I am beholden to my fear.
I find familiar what has been estranged from me.
Sheng Kao is a Taiwanese American writer. Nominated twice for Best of the Net, her work has previously appeared in The Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s The Margins and The Offing, where she is a reader for the Micro Department. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington.
Hailey Stumpo is a Dover-based fine artist currently pursuing a degree in studio art at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania. Her works have been acquired by private collectors in Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware, including renowned oil painter Dr. Sandra Corpora, by whom Stumpo has been mentored for three years. You can find Hailey on Instagram @indieannaartwork and on her website.
