eric's Writing Portfolio

(This poem was invited to be published on Polyphony Lit’s Voices Blog)

I woke up to your smile

And blinked a couple times, trying to remember 

How I ended up sharing warmth and holding hands 

Through the night with the boy I spent the past year 

Fantasizing a life with. He’s been in my head for so long…

I pinch my cheek softly, making sure it’s not another lonely daydream at lunch.

“Are…are you ok?” you ask with an awkward chuckle, 

Staring at me with the same daze I had for you. 

As a child, I related most to Alice,

stuck in a strange, illogical world with baffling rules

And identities I never agreed to. Sixteen years ago,

I must have tumbled down a rabbit hole 

Into a confusing alien land of magical true-love kisses 

Where princes and princesses strolled down halls adorned with

White gowns and picket fences and skin as white as snow.

But unlike Alice, I’d never wake from this dream.

The first name I heard for this wonderland was “美国 (Mĕiguó),”

And the second was “America.” But my skin and eyelids spoke of the place I was really from. 

At my culture’s mad tea party, amidst Mahjong and clinking china,

I heard tales of a special American monster – one hard to distinguish but uncanny. Queer, even. 

With white knots and picket fences and skin, they were colonizing

The descendants of Five Thousand Years of History and Tradition

With baffling rules, unwanted identities, and demonic wrong-love kisses;

I learned to protect myself from those rummaging to find me. 

I mastered an ancient recipe rediscovered each generation, though with American ingredients:

A wrinkle of the nose, a furrowed brow, a fascinated glimmer in the eyes,

Lips curling into a smirk of political self-righteousness,

A voice of simultaneous acceptance and disgust at the queer monster they hear in tales.

Wear the mask. 

Push your jaw closed when your soul craves sunlight. 

Don’t bother solving the riddles; you’ll only hurt yourself.

I learned to play sexuality chess in this upside-down fun-house mirror. 

But at this eternal moment in this room, 

All the confusion, gaslighting, and lying are just memories

Reduced to dust from a darker age. Now, it’s only us

On that soft bed. The “gay gene” that spans space and time

Across an ocean to a continent our ancestors never knew

Finally awakens in us 

After two centuries of dreaming.

“My arm kind of hurts,” I whisper,

Squinting at the sunlit window blinds nearby. 

“You’ve been sleeping on it all night.”

I shuffle closer to you. My cheek on yours and

Our breaths mingling in our sweet cocoon,

We…

My heart jolted as reality knocked on the door, echoing through the room.

I jumped off your bed, and you quickly sat up, pulling out your computer.

Drooping my lips out of a smile, I opened the door and stepped back through the looking glass 

To my wonderland of past fakery and future fantasies.