What I Learned About the Ocean

in landlocked Illinois: Cloudy fish tanks in the mom-and-pop
Chinese grocery. Singing America the Beautiful in school—sea
to shining sea fading into a wail as Mandarin voices spit 美国
有什么美的 in the storage room. The bodies in the shallowing lake
that summer. St. Lawrence River a vein to the Atlantic, never enough
proper nouns for tragedy as the cornfields go on and on. Water mirage
over asphalt. Cola vape over the gas station sink. Photos soaked
in a 2009 Walgreens of my mother in the Bay, still with a student visa
and painful hope as the Golden Gate Bridge slits a thin throughway
above a field of diamonds. I always wondered what it’s like to live
next to something so powerful that it’s there even when it’s not. Then
everything sharp hummed like a submerged engine as I ran
fingertips down unbroken skin. Point Nemo every glowing window
with a locked door. The girl onscreen weeping behind a podium
about mothers smuggled on boats, Pacific Ocean artificed into
national anthem, though both of ours came on Boeing 747s with
PhD admission letters and blood in their mouths. My grandfather
still smoking his throat raw somewhere on the Tianjin ports as another
voice whets itself violent in the suburban silence. Pupils that dilate
at the first sign of death. An ocean isn’t really water until you take it
into your hands. Her breathing kiss me right now in the hot, melting dark,
and I could only stare unmoving at her moon-white teeth. Turning
my heart into seafoam. I’m sorry. I don’t know how else to love.