* — May 29, 2021
Journey to find the scriptures only the scriptures are blank, after Wu Cheng’en
Lemon No. 468, Funasaka Yoshisuke, 1976, Gift of Marguerite Michaels, Art Institute of Chicago

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Let me tell you what I know about exile—

how it begins with elegy and ends with elegy.

What matters is what happens in between. Understand:

a deer with slanted eyes or a blind cat

running through the trees. Yes. No. Maybe

the wind in the alley emits a hollow sound.

I’ll never understand how to circle the periphery

of history, baby. Field theory, baby:

layer upon layer. At its source, a house

with no doors. Between the meat world and the real world,

I am so busy. With earthly matters.

Open a fresh can for the cat. Run laps

on the treadmill, trying to get my flirt on. Enlightenment is

an exit where I punch a hole in the wall,

let it widen until it becomes blank and relentless

as rain. Although I grow my hair long

and master the quietism practiced by burning monks,

still I mispronounce every L. Still my lexicon

piss as poor. I was born

at the last minute, which is to say:

however long it takes, you can take that long.

Originally published in No Tokens Issue No. 9. View full issue & more.
*

Angie Sijun Lou is from Seattle. Her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, FENCE, Black Warrior Review, the Adroit Journal, the Asian American Literary Review, Hyphen, the Margins, and others. She is a Kundiman Fellow, a PhD student in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of California Santa Cruz, and a calculus instructor at San Quentin State Prison.