how dare you prick my finger & lick it & say it tastes sweet after i've cried salty tears into my calluses & color with anguish on my palms when i'm bored & you say that life is beautiful but the most beautiful thing i've seen today is ash that singed my eyebrows & cauterized my nerves & is that why i feel so numb to pain now or is it just that i'm used to life kicking me & singing nursery rhymes as i slip in mud & grasp at absent hands & i lay in the discarded cinders of your love & i cry and watch as the droplets turn to steam on the hot coals before my eyes & you waft it toward your nose & say it tastes like butterscotch & that makes me mad because no matter how much i endure & endure & endure, you'll always say my pain tastes of sugarplums & that can be good, right & whenever i lick my hips, licorice bites my tongue & i wish that i'd at least get an undertone of pepper so i know that the discomfort isn't just in my head

head

head

i.

my seventh-grade classmate slapped me with the back of her hand, inked in slurs

and i stood there and let the words become an iron brand on my cheek.

she spits into my food: “sorry to ruin your lunch—wouldn’t want to ruin the taste of dog.”

the words on my face burn hot. i don’t move to rub them away.

ii.

i bet your parents came to america to work in a california nail salon. i bet they probably cleaned my grandaddy’s toes.

actually, my mom arrived in ellis island, and she waved at lady liberty, and i bet she didn’t know that lady liberty’s a filthy snake and a liar

i bet your parents are proud that this great country even allowed them in

yeah, i bet they are. i bet it’s everything my dad imagined when he starved, drifting in the pacific and i bet he really liked being called a yellow gangster and i bet he felt real welcome when he wasn’t allowed in some restaurants and i bet it was way better than his family’s life being threatened by some men in red uniforms back home.

iii.

i wore a face mask in public last weekend and a man told me to bring the chinese disease back to where i came from. i wondered if i forgot to wash off “alien” from my forehead that morning

he spat on me, so i used his spit to rub his slurs off my cheek

he ended up breaking my nose, and i heard the noise of my bones snapping, and it sounded like: “chink, chink.”

iv.

well, i mean, america spits on people like me and 

america spits on people who don’t really behave all that right

and america kinda spits on everything that makes it scared but

i think you know that. i hope you know that.

but it’s just, selfishly, all i can think about is me, and that

america spat on me last weekend. and i don’t really think i liked it all that much.

bind your hand, child,

lest you use it,

pencil to paper,

cane to flesh,

suppress that evil.

bind your hand, child,

lest you be seen as different,

chopsticks to mouth,

carefully, carefully,

don't let the baozi fall.

bind your hand, girl,

lest you smear your writing,

write your characters,

stroke by stroke,

perfect, like the rest of you must be.

bind your hand, girl,

lest you be seen as disrespectful,

shake hands,

right and true,

keep that dirty hand away.

bind your hand, woman ,

lest you bring bad omens upon yourself,

smile, say your vows,

you couldn't have married without the switch.

bind his hand, new mother,

lest your child use it.

you saw him use the crayon with the wrong hand,

keep the tradition alive.

i’m not sure why i can’t remember most of my childhood.

it feels like a poem / broken up / like this / all scattered / shattered like a mirror / each different part of me staring back / distorted and distended / and i have to remind myself / who i was before / cannot haunt me / if i do not let her.

i didn’t realise until we started this exercise that i held so much tension in my body - a tightly wound ball of nausea under my sternum, a shaky, nervous one between my shoulder blades, something sharp in my lower back. i also didn’t anticipate what trying to release it would do, how when tension dissipates, it leaves something raw and harsh in its place, something that bubbles over when you least expect.

anxiety is a bitch, and you don’t know how bad it is until you try to release it and end up crying on the floor, trying to scroll through memories that you can’t find or can’t face. you don’t know you’re running from your past until it’s shoved in your face - when you have to remember how your hair looked or what you wore or what you used to do, and realise exactly how much it hurts you.

must you ask me a question before i take this pledge? i already know what belies me. there is a running stream that i will sit besides and lay a blanket by its bed, and i will take her hand and cease to yearn. the end all, be all: shall it be lovelier than what i’ve heard? i have loved fiercely without restraint, and that is, perhaps, what makes me unforgivable. there is a house on a hill; i’ve decorated it in my own liking from inside to out, but i would be amiss to say that i did not decorate the kitchen countertops with peonies in the image of us, for i did, as i always do, in the image of us. should i wake up in the morning and be greeted by sun-streaks kissing my cheeks through our blinds, accompanied by your arms around me? as they never say: hate the sinner, not the sin. promise to place a gentle kiss to my closed eyelids when the stars remind me that i cannot be loved for the way i was born. there is a cockatoo in a cage that was mailed to us: do you think it was fate, or an even more dastardly force, a bumbling honeybee? i imagine there is a polaroid of us holding hands on my work desk that i decorated with smell stickers to please you. do you remember when you first held sugary sweets to my lips, or was it a mirage i imagined in my longing? i dream of prose spent together. i am no longer alone. so keep me close to your chest: i am yours, a whistling waterfall tamed into a wife. i take this pledge for you.

raise a torch to blue eyes-bred like infants through colossal, paint-chipped desires

we pass grease-stained carwashes, gasoline emanating our nostrils heavy, coarse night air filters our love

cigarette smoke and your hand is bloodied, can i feign my disbelief, as it haunts me, yet again?

sonic moments of paradise hide underneath beige cushions of stolen betrayal, streetlights accomplices

she busks under nightly skies,crimson blisters are remnants, orion accompanies the wanderers, nebulae traverse, uncharted

golden hair frames stretched skin, eyes illuminating the places you could go to, grazed fingers in sweaty,raw palms

"to kill a child, a sin," red wine gushes out, waterfalls of hatred- the illusion of tranquility lay shattered among glass

auburn fire in her glazed eyes, dashes of strawberry remnants, heart-shaped lockets be damned, star-crossed, un/crossed

'vande mataram', you whisper, but green armour-clad, unfurled tricolour trembling,you are well aware that

saffron paints over your blood-streaked lips, frost-bitten with the enemy of vengeance, foe and friend

shrieking cries, your sons have sacrificed, broken promises, of the greater good, but for what?

for azaadi, echoing out,for the lives of your countrymen, infants who now rest easy-gunshots ring out amid darken skies

Enter post-2007 J.K. Rowling, most notable for inventions such as Pottermore and the nightmarish Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Broadway play.  She has been noted too for the uninspired, un-fantastic Fantastic Beasts screenplays, as well as her ever-raging, ever-controversial Twitter account.  Suffice it to say, it has been a downhill road since our beloved Potter books were first published in 1997.

Few fans, however, have traversed the largely uncharted territories of Rowling’s post-Potter novels.  There are five, in total––The Casual Vacancy, a long novel detailing the happenings of a small English town; and, under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, the Cormoran Strike crime fiction series, consisting of four books as of yet and concerning the title detective and his assistant Robin Ellacott.  This week, I finished the Cormoran Strike series’s lengthy latest installment, Lethal White, which means that I can celebrate the not-very-celebratable milestone of having read every book J.K. Rowling has ever written.  Before I discuss this week’s read, I should provide background on the other works of this non-Potter phase of Rowling’s career.  She kicked off her exploration of the larger writing world with 2012’s realistic fiction The Casual Vacancy.  In one word, the book is unpleasant––it reeks with bitter, bickering conflicts and horribly unlikable characters.  The book feels as though Rowling had felt liberated from the constraints of children’s fiction and delved deep into the nastiest renditions of adult life.  Gone mad with the power of her new adult fiction abilities, Rowling confided all of her worst fears about the darkness of the adult soul to readers with raised eyebrows, and sought to strip every character she imagined to the very worst of their person.  She managed to mellow her tone in the following years with the Cormoran Strike whodunit books––The Cuckoo’s Calling and The Silkworm, published in 2013 and 2014 respectively, contained their own multitudes of glimpses into adult life (this time alongside the lurid corpses of crime victims) but the characters here had much more heart than the characters in The Casual Vacancy––they felt like actual people, as opposed to Vacancy’s cruel, callous machines.  Rowling quested for darker plots again in 2015’s Career of Evil, which was much grislier than either of its predecessors, featuring Jack the Ripper-like antics, the worst of which included gorey glimpses into the murderer’s collection of women’s body parts and a severed rotting toe taped to a wedding card.  But again, the characters were lovable and the relationships were endearing, and so the few Potter fans who had dared to venture this far into the darker recesses of Rowling’s troubled mind forgave her for the nightmares that Career of Evil caused.

By the time Lethal White rolled around in 2018, the whodunit narrative felt a little old, particularly as this book’s question of “Was it a murder or was it suicide?” felt like a direct copy of The Cuckoo’s Calling’s case.  At this point, I would enjoy the novels much more if the entire mystery were cut out and was instead replaced with a soap opera-like view of Strike and Robin’s forbidden attraction to one another.  They’ve had their closest call yet to admitting their feelings for one another when Strike, to quote the final pages of the novel, “pulled [Robin] clumsily into a one-armed hug.”  Who knows, what with Troubled Blood coming out later this year, maybe more hopeful fans could expect a hug with two arms next time.  I’m certainly getting my hopes up that the upcoming novel will feature more character drama than plot drama, because I cannot for the life of me follow and enjoy the actual mystery, and I’m sick to death of elongated scenes in which Strike stumps around the London streets, brooding about the case and complaining about how much his amputated leg hurts.

Here is a quick run-down of Lethal White’s plot: 

Jasper Chiswell, a wealthy government minister, hires Cormoran Strike to investigate Jimmy Knight, a young activist, and Geraint Winn, husband of another government minister, who were blackmailing Chiswell for a cause unknown to Strike.  Strike agrees and places Robin Ellacott, his assistant, in Chiswell’s Parliament office undercover to keep tabs on Winn.  Robin meets Chiswell’s employees, including many of his children from various marriages to younger women.  Chiswell is then found dead in his office from overdose and then suffocation.  The death is believed to be suicide, but Chiswell’s daughter Izzy hires Strike to investigate further, hoping that Chiswell was instead murdered by his current wife Kinvara.  Strike discovers that Chiswell was being blackmailed because he built gallows for export, one of which was stolen by rebels in Zimbabwe and used to murder a British teenager.  Strike identifies Kinvara and Chiswell’s illegitimate son Raphael as accomplices in the murder, and Robin’s detective work reveals that Raphael’s motive was to steal a painting of Chiswell’s valued at twenty-two million dollars that he recognized as a work of George Stubbs.  After Strike and the police agree that the murder was the combined work of Kinvara and Raphael, Robin is captured by Raphael and held at gunpoint.  She survives long enough to be saved by Strike and the police.

The case is interspersed with scenes from Strike’s and Robin’s personal lives.  For Robin, this means a rapidly deteriorating marriage that climaxes when she discovers that her husband is cheating on her, continued suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder after being attacked by a murderer in the previous novel, and fending off her attraction for Strike.  For Strike, this means dealing with his nephew’s appendix bursting, breaking up with his girlfriend Lorelei, fending off his attraction to Robin, and––of course!––the endless complaints about how much the prosthesis attached to his amputated leg hurts him.  And there are many, many case-related plot details that I neglected to mention in my summary, because I think if I tried to mention everything of importance in the novel, my summary would be longer than the actual book.  I’m still not sure what the significance of some of those details were.

I have read four of these Cormoran Strike books now, and each time I read one I start out by adequately understanding what is being talked about.  I get into such high spirits about understanding one of the mysteries that I completely miss the next wave of information being thrown at me, so that by the time the case concludes I’m drowning hopelessly in a sea of plot details that were lost on me.  When I was two-thirds through with Lethal White, I confessed to my sister, who has read the Strike books as well, that the ocean of plot had me drowned again, worried aloud that I might never truly enjoy detective fiction, and then added desperately, “But I understood Agatha Christie!”  To which my sister told me that she never really had a grasp on Rowling’s plots either, and then she said that I could follow Christie’s stories better because Christie was simply better at detective fiction.  To which the indignant Harry Potter fan in me rushed to defend the hero that we all know J.K. Rowling is, despite her lack of showing it over the last thirteen years.

Despite my naivety at the details of the Strike cases, I would easily recommend Cormoran Strike to a friend.  All of the books in the series are more or less the same––confusing plot, intense and interesting looks into the lives and personalities of the characters, lovely prose, fairly satisfying conclusion.  They’re not perfect books, but they’re solidly dependable and easily readable.  The language and style of prose is heavily reminiscent of Harry Potter, and an astute reader will notice little exchanges between Strike and Robin that are worded exactly the same as exchanges between, for example, Harry and Hermione.  Therefore I enjoyed Lethal White.  And more importantly, I was so glad J.K. Rowling was filling up her time writing detective fiction: it means that the next Fantastic Beasts screenplay just might be slightly delayed.

i drank the contents of a walmart juice box from my mom’s wine glass last friday.

shut my eyes, guzzled the bubbles; you know, i pretended

it was all champagne.

i sat on the driveway some time ago and i

memorized the chalk mosaics and crayola masterpieces i used to make.

in a couple months, i’ll get a license, and i’ll smear them thrice over

in a silver chevrolet.

a while ago, at the mall, a woman’s baby bottle dropped from her stroller,

and i ran after her and told her, “ma’am, you lost this by the café.”

so she took the bottle, smiled, squeezed my shoulder, and said,

“you’re a good girl, dear. when you grow up: stay this way.”

and maybe it’s odd to think about, but since middle school,

my handwriting has never looked the same.

and also, it’s just that, i can’t stop thinking:

when i was younger, it’d felt like every week, i’d have a new reason to pray,

but dear God, growing up feels like going faithless on a sunday.

and so, i pity the woman with the stroller at the mall

who had hoped i’d stay that way.

because there’s a price to getting older

i can’t help but wonder if i’ve already paid.

i love how i’ve been able to break myself free from the confinements of school writing

“never write with no punctuation” “never have run-on sentences” “never use i in lowercase”

as a writer (i love being able to say that) i feel that the english language is already so flexible

like u kan read dis u undurstan dis an it isn’t evon korrect 

you

        can 

   read

            this

andthisandthisandthisandthisandthisandthis

i could go on and on about whatever and you’d be able to read it and understand me and it’d be coherent and it’d all make sense like how raindrops race down on a window of a passing car or how sneakers get more and more red the longer you run on the track and it doesn’t matter because you just read it and you’re reading this and you know what it means even though this is one super long sentence and it’s choppy and messy and all over the place it doesn’t matter

becuz in da end

there

     is

no

        right

   way

               to 

                    write