Debbie Hu

all yr hurt flows

after Anne Boyer

“Intellectual women who have feelings like THE COW.  Gay men like THE COW.  Men who like to have sex with women who have a lot of feelings like THE COW.  People who like things with good style and no typos do not like THE COW.  I can sympathize with them, but those people are not my problem.” - Ariana Reines

Some people don't like my writing.

Intellectual women who have feelings don't like my writing. Gay men do not like my writing. Men who like to have sex with women who have a lot of feelings do not like my writing. People who like things with good style and no typos do not like my writing. I can sympathize with them,

But I'd like to know why I feel people's eyes glazing over when I say things like “I'm oriental.”

For some reason that makes people feel like they don't need my story.

            & in the weather pattern

            made

            by your guilt or

                                                curiosity piqued by

                        my LOVING de-formed alienation

I'd like to show that alienation is a writing prompt

I want to not be afraid of the reserves of alienation I hold

            in my body

I want to listen to it and let it come out like music

I dream poetry that colonizes the internet like a wound

Where nothing goes viral like discontent

Spreading from eyes to stomach to heart to head to mouth, to each mouth

So that whenever one opens their mouth in shock or horror or disgust or outrage

That there are words

ready, words to give speech to the speechless & phrases for tears

words for the numb

I want people so open & porous to each other

that a shock to one body

is a shock to the entire network,

where the things that get amplified

are cries of injustice

(Can the People's Mic accommodate everything?)

(Mother, I have within me

voices and visions.)

It will be so much of everything all the time.

It will be over over overwhelming

            and de de de destabilizing

And all the things you thought you wanted or needed

            will come to seem strange,

                                                                                                stranger than bad writing, or good writing,

                                                                                                            writing that's more than good

Questions of craft will be made irrelevant

& the hungry

            will be

                        given food, just to make the

                                                            shock

                                                                                    stop

& the hatred of rapists & abusers & bullies & war makers will be visible & known

there will be an enormous transmission of public anger

when the public is so angry that it becomes a real war against those who hate us

when the sick are so loud in their neediness that every spare resource is given for their comfort

and when the babies cry we do not enjoy their song but we respond because their cry has lodged inside of us

& laughter, too, will spread as earthquakes spread –

we will especially laugh when things are true.

                                                It is not difficult to get the news from poems.

            No poetry but in lives.

Poetry becomes the sublimely useful tool

through which the private is made public and the public is made okay.

I remember when we came out in public and found

that we each bore

important messages.

(What “we?”)

Debbie Hu lives in New Zealand. Her blog is http://areyouoverityet.tumblr.com and she tweets as @debbiehu. She has a book forthcoming from Perfect Lovers Press called Airy Baby: An Equel to the Ate Nipple? // I Don Really Believe in Books.