Poems for Leeds
by Anthony Tao
I landed in Beijing
February 2023
to find everything had not changed
like they said. From the jetway I sensed
a familiar austerity in the haze rising
out of double-barreled chimneys, sky smoke
flattening landscape, blurring time.
This was the city where everything, mortar
and air, grew older before their time, time
lost as easily as jade turned into stone—
and stone to jade, when time permits.
I hadn’t been sure I’d miss this place,
but then I arrived at the baggage claim floor
where a door ajar revealed a converted office
with security guards resting on bunk beds.
This was the Beijing I knew, where very little
squares with what you’ve read.
Outside, the thin cold slipped under my coat,
through my fingers. Drive in double time,
I told the cab driver, let’s cut through this dust,
and off we went through the coarse aesthetics,
leaving behind jaundiced fields, anorexic trees.
Cold doubled, smoke doubled, fortune doubled.
Industry banded together to blot out the sun.
Light in Beijing is just a glare anyway, a sheet
of diffused pale spread over carved-out streams
and flapping in wind, flicked onto windows, cracking
above coal or in the ancient firepits of memory—
the unspoken hopes, the glittering struggles.
Being Someone Else
Cindy donned a dinosaur onesie
Jerry came as Mad Max
Dani wore face paint like she was in Cats
James squeezed into a pink dress
And since this was 2021, plenty
of Squid Game tracksuits and masks
Someday we’ll leave it all behind, Manuel observed,
his mustache curled upward like Rich Uncle Pennybags
Someday isn’t today, Arianna replied,
tugging at blue socks inside slippers dipped in red dye
The DJ spun while bodies bumped
Strange remixes from Austria thumped
How many more days and nights they’ll go on like this
is anyone’s guess. We cede the floor to those
who believe it never gets better than this
They’re the fresh-faced, thin-boned
who look good in smart jeans or hot tights
and flirt effortlessly as saying hi
“Empire State of Mind” came on, the song by Jay-Z,
and a coterie of young Chinese
in and out of costume began mouthing
Let’s hear it for New York
Let these lights inspire you
Take another shot and go go go. Go
be someone else: Dracula, Cruella, clown—
a young adult with a direction and care
Maybe it does never get better than this
No self-exams out here, just a song and a prayer
Sandstorm
Is that sun or ulcer, cancer or moon?
Silver, the smell of arsenic, shape of methane
On papier-mâché, eye of abscess
Punched into plywood.
Sky has tint, dust texture. Orchids
In these florets of spring leave hope shaded.
The city has been upset, sneezing chalk, achromic
With canker sore. How unsettling to step outside
In the bottom of our bowl, snowed under the weight
Of economy, dirt and saliva swimming, to find
Jester on the throne, tartar on the tongue, phlegm
Dried up the nose. Methane is a tetrahedral,
I know, color returns with wind, sand
Just an itinerant riding through
On a caravan of heat. Still.
Is that a sun or moon?
In the City
He was fond of saying
We’ll see,
unable to commit
to noncommittal entreaties.
We can brag we’re twenty-first century
modern men, millennials,
but the truth is we’re as stupid
as the boomers,
bitter at facts, fidgeting
with ciphers and devices.
What I’m trying to say is,
it wasn’t anyone’s fault
that he said We’ll see
when she asked about dinner.
The next evening, dining
over candle and cocktails,
they played their parts politely,
enthusiastically bantering and trying
hard to find the other funny,
interesting, etc. After all, they hankered
to use the other as anchor, sought
reprieve on a decision, wanting
not to know where this was heading,
not know the nowhere their lives had folded into
in a city that just might be, if they thought about it,
unhealthy for their souls. This place
has us cynical, unfeeling, or feeling
like we deserve more than we’ve got.
What were you doing last night? she asked, I think
implying he should have gone to her then.
I was busy, he replied. Writing—
as if recording one’s vanity cleanses us of it.
Anything to ensure
he was not the one hurt
by her unasked question
with its implication, with an answer
he could not give:
What are you doing now?
Self-Censorship
Bosses visited. Not their first time
in China, but it’d been long enough
for them to love it. Or at least say so
on the high-speed train from Beijing
through the windmill-dappled inland
past state-of-the-art bridges and EVs
to amusement-park Shanghai. It isn’t
as I remember it, they said. Of course
I put up with their gushing, resisted
rolling my eyes when they complained
they couldn’t send a tweet. Insights
came to me—though others likely
noticed too—the insanity of $8 coffee,
of watering the asphalt, of requiring
a Chinese ID to book most hotels.
We passed a man on the street
bent over spare parts, repairing fans
for a buck-fifty. We passed empty
rows of apartments. The economy
is at an inflection point, they were told,
local economists and academics all
more pessimistic about the future
than they. All that glitters, I suppose.
They delighted in the craft beer,
the newly shaded alleys, cat cafés.
We drank and ate too much, cheese
dumplings and numbing hotpot,
sucking air through our teeth, ranting
on American politics and Michelin bullshit.
They added Chinese coins to their handbag
of exotic languages, alongside ahlan,
annyeonghaseyo, cześć. Tangping
was their favorite, meaning “lie flat,”
a form of quiet quitting among
Chinese youth. I’m glad to see
you haven’t tangping, they said
as I whisked them from subway to
construction site to Xinjiang diner,
where we talked climate. John Kerry
could’ve accomplished more, they said,
adding, No one probably cares.
On their final night, they paid for dinner
through an app, beaming, I can’t believe
all the things you can do on your phone,
and, It’s about time WeChat linked
to American credit cards. I admit
to a bit of satisfaction recognizing
the conveniences I took for granted.
And the tradeoff, what our relatives
gave up, told as they were, Stay out
of politics and you can get rich.
I pondered the changes I’ll be first
to witness, living in this ongoing
experiment we signed up for
through a swipe and a tap. I think
I won’t tell them; let them discover
the future themselves, when it arrives.
When they left, I did feel tired, in need
of a nice liedown. On my phone
I ordered takeout and watched videos
until I forgot things I wanted to say.
St. Patrick’s Day in Beijing
What’s the craic? The revelers were out.
The embassy’s Guinness ran out
so we battered on to Paddy’s,
their Chinese staff, you know, full of
sass and charming, happy and knowing
how to give the business, Katherine
buzzing to see us. Jameson and gingers
evaporated between our teeth, we took
a shillelagh to our livers, said Keep working
ya bastard, brogue heavy with desperately
seeking truth and beauty or whatever problems
cursing the English will tide over. Meanwhile
a donnybrook broke out between the tongue
and soul, a crowd gathered to watch Smitty’s
spit get knocked out. People in Ireland don’t have to
do that shit, Da Rou said, referring to an American
wearing green on this holiday no one knows anything about.
I was on the lash, my head’s in bits, but who cares
—Ganbei, cheers and bottoms up, curse duty,
the oncoming morning, the incomprehensible
languages of spirits in flight. Shamrocks up,
curse the brain, stow away heartache, curse
the saint this day is named after, who was
British. Oh I love too much and by such by such
in this Irish bar owned by a Frenchman. Sláinte
good friends, all glasses refilled, nothing needs
remembering this day with the revelers out, joy
and desperation truth beauty whatever. We’ll grow old
never or maybe when the Guinness runs out.
Through the streets broad and narrow we sang
seeing the ways Dublin and Beijing are the same.
Shannon sat on the curb and Aoife swayed
and Paul was crying for some reason. When tomorrow
tells us it’s half-past way too bloody bright do we
snooze or go guns blazing, effing and blinding,
chasing snakes again till the sun Irish goodbyes?
Leaving
For Matthew Byrne
I’m going back, Matt said,
and there he was / back
in the life where he was meant
in Manchester, ex-musician married
with baby on the way, in the way life
is meant—not here / in the
deep hours of a Beijing night
across a sour IPA, baiting reply
with a vigorous stare, eager to cut down
our desperation for meaning, for
documentation / for days when we’ve
grown old on the seats of prefab pubs
mutilating our stories for the pleasure
of strangers but knowing
what truths / we cherish
enough to preserve. It’s the end
of Fairyland. Now we must return
to duty. For a brief moment
I’m there with him / on the Congleton soil,
which is the pavement of a call center,
England’s roots needling out of his pores,
Ireland twined around bones of the dead,
cigarette cindering between fingers,
alcohol thickening in the blood,
eyes fixed upward,
the forgotten rising like water,
clamor until / there are drums,
there is poetry, there is a stage
for us to shout everything we pray will last,
reverie and rain during some charmed spring
escapade, pique and clang and smoke and then
the painful brightness of a 7 a.m. obtrusion
through which we stumble / our ears ringing
to a dreamless sleep.
Burning
A fifth straight day above 100.
We’re walking through soup
carrying the weight of extra CO2.
Bike gears screech, paint shrivels,
old men hike up their shirts, ants
find reasons to not work. Tempers
and common sense crack too
in the cauldron. Even after the sun
has clocked out, embers smolder, wants
blister. I watched a cop jam a knee
into the neck of a facedown drunk
tossed out of a club for fighting.
Minutes and minutes and minutes
passed until onlookers no longer
looked. Cooler heads did not prevail.
When the ambulance arrived
the cop hoisted him up from his
cuffed hands as if he were a parcel.
They strapped him on a gurney
and loaded him in, all of it
feeling unnecessary, like an extra
ten degrees when we’re already
boiling; when regret has registered
but the mouth just needs a second
to say I’m sorry. This was purgatory,
too late for discretion, too early
for breakfast. Soon the sun,
not properly rested, would begin
its slow ascent, lugging light
and all that, overeager. That bastard.
Really being a dick about it.
Watching The Matrix in Beijing
February 2022
Five of us were in the bar to start,
four stayed. The others couldn’t have
gone far: The Olympics are three weeks
away. People were angry as usual
in ways we didn’t know. Social media
was insisting so-and-so
comment on this-and-that,
while from afar it was easy to think
here or there was falling apart;
tomorrow the news people will find
another topic. Scan the health codes
or fake it if you want, Just go through
the motions to give us face, the guards
bundled up to their chins seem to say
with incurious eyes. Demanding nothing
is key to thriving in 2022 Beijing,
a simulacrum we accept. Bullet time,
like Xi’an locked down. Your city
may be next. A woman lost her baby
because her covid test expired;
a man’s heart attack went untreated
since his district was “medium-risk,”
said an app. Who programmed humans?
Long ago we ran out of outlets to vent.
Don’t get me wrong, but it’s easier
to take the pills. We’ve settled
into our modules, shunted disease
to the alleys. Fear shuffles its feet
like neighborhood fogeys who’ve seen
enough. Everything’s fine and if and when
they’re not, the new new normal will have
to do. Is this real? Neo asks. It’s not,
two of us replied.
Beijing Cough
August 2022
It was hard to say—hard
but also pointless—how
it started. It spread: It
spoke, wrapped around throats
and squeezed, causing eyes
to water, spittle to fly. It said
Take me in, let me preach.
Somehow
the wee bugger survived
in our summer of masks
and vigilance, jumping
from nose and mouth
to nose and mouth, orating
not the dry exegeses of
particulate and soot—
yesteryear’s “Beijing cough”
—but the triumphant, wet
allegories of communion,
the conjoining of voices,
solos linked and rising
like chorus, cacophonous.
It’s going around, we said,
because so were we,
evangelicals of an old order
with our defenses down,
reshaping our environment
as easily as breathing.
We capered
and caroused, then shared
what we could of remedies:
ginger tea, a long nap, a good
sweat bath. How we missed
all this, life’s subtle reminders
of mortality, believing normal
meant we lived without
conditions. As if the piper
had forgotten, and we could
enforce our own price.