Volatile

by Hahn, Kimiko

• ISBN13: 9781882413560
• ISBN10: 1882413563
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-04-01
• Publisher: Hanging Loose Pr

Summary

Poetry. In this book, Kimiko Hahn manages to take the air of atrocity we breathe in daily and turn it into fierce political/ lyrical poetry, in the tradition of Shelley's The Masque of Anarchy. Current events ripped open and the entrails exposed in living color. She is one of our strongest poets-Harvey Shapiro. In VOLATILE, Hahn's lyrical voice maintains its course through narratives ranging from quiet recollections of childhood to the sometimes unbearable horrors of the modern world: She watched her child starve. Watched her neighbor get clubbed to death. Watched another disappear./ (how the mind acts to what the body perceives)/ 'Dissociation,' a state of altered consciousness. If I am on a freeway daydreaming and drive past the exit... (Blindsided: a zuihitsu). Kimiko Hahn is the author of AIR POCKET and EARSHOT (both from Hanging Loose Press) and THE UNBEARABLE HEART (Kaya), all of which are available from SPD.

Table of Contents

These Current Events	p. 11
The Heartbeat of Humidity	p. 13
The Glass Bracelets	p. 15
Found	p. 17
If You Speak	p. 18
Mother's Mother	p. 20
The Variable Field	p. 22
The Box of White Buttons	p. 25
The Daughters and the Crow	p. 26
Errands	p. 27
The Sunflower	p. 28
Another Use for Ice	p. 29
West 1-0-5	p. 30
A Small Portrait	p. 31
The City Architect	p. 32
The Early 70s	p. 33
The Shower	p. 34
"A Radical View of Menstruation"	p. 36
Lice	p. 39
Everest	p. 40
Lili, 1933	p. 42
The Details We Fall For	p. 43
Mine	p. 47
The Volcano's Desire	p. 59
Possession	p. 79
Blindsided	p. 82
Notes	p. 89
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Excerpt

    These Current Events

It is a late twentieth century cliché that we must turn off

the hypersensitive television to distract our truer desire;

that we must switch off all the lamps and overheads,

open the shade to the natural night

with its artificial lights, dress in silk to undress,

play and play until even the nerve endings in our teeth beg

and we throb forcefully with all the affection

of reproducing ourselves in the act that will not.

In the sweat of it all, despite ideology, we shut out

the current events of the afternoon.

A few miles from my office a boat capsizes,

excretes three hundred men and women

into the frigid undertow towards death

or clean prison clothing and free legal assistance.

They are not poor by their own standards

and not all the same--teacher, peasant, entrepreneur--what

they fled was a state of dreaming

to the object of that illusion, as thousands before them,

millions behind. One states he is ambitious.

Another admits he has made a grave error .

As their bus glides through Flushing will they see

the American destitute housed in cardboard boxes?

I cannot look the man in the eye

who asks for spare change .

He smells of urine. His teeth are falling out.

Spare , janus word for extra and little.

Surplus for one, dear to another. Dear young man,

there is a collective for you, a union, a regiment,

the biblical multitude of spare people,

the redundant masses of spare labor.

Come exhausted and squalid,

come shitcovered, shitfaced, diseased and immune,

prick and cunt, come third world capitalist,

come Chinese laborer whose forefathers

blew tunnels through mountains,

lay track across the continent,

cut cane, starched the white shirts of the bourgeoisie;

whose uncle of your grandmother

fell unconscious under an avalanche of ice

in the Sierra Nevadas and could not be recovered

until the spring thaw. Come to the land of surplus value

where someone will overdose one night

after twenty hours of bussing tables. The stories

you have not heard or if you did you translated their meaning

as propaganda to keep you poor in a poor country

as opposed to poor in a wealthy country.

I cannot look in the face of the man cursing me out

because I don't want my car window washed.

I cannot look at the man, empty cup, empty pant legs,

who flashes a razor at me on his tongue.

I cannot speak to the girl pregnant with addiction

thanking me for nothing . I can

pick the paper up any day of the week

and find so much sorrow it is difficult to believe

there are solutions.

In the summer exhaust of a million air conditioners

I turn to my beloved for psalms, for physical reassurance.

The children snore softly behind the fan's whirl

because we have a place to plug in a fan.

If I turn to him or to you, if I turn to sheafs of paper

in order to turn away from these current events

it is only to revive the heartbeat of commitment.

I know poetry cannot save

but it fuels the gut that is able.

for Adrienne

    The Heartbeat of Humidity

Against the June heat rising from the soft avenue

lined with bodegas, botanica, fix-it shops,

and the occasional numbers joint,

a street fair stretches various arms and awnings.

I step into the heat.

After my daughters are equipped with cones of shaved ice

I come to notice oil paintings stacked on two card tables.

Haitian artists? I ask. Yes--all from Port o'Prince.

From the depictions of laborers hauling and carrying

I spot a jungle scene with vegetation in every corner

even covering in part the panther, leopard and tiger

all in demanding mixtures of purple. This one please.

I ask the children what they like best

about the painting by J. Charlot.

Miya, the two palms that resemble car flares.

Rei, the three cats . I favor the leopard,

each spot as patterned as if stenciled.

I note their tails look like--a lamb's? not at all a cat's--and

think, these animals must not exist in Haiti so may be

part of the artist's fantasy--of Africa?

From a collective fantasy?

Somewhere in a barbed wire "facility"

translation is not linguistic but the physical

exchange of geographic location.

What blocks political and/or economic refugees here

is a small thing, a virus that debilitates

the very arteries of a culture. Who

pockets the key? Who owns the boats? Who counts the taxes

that pay for this detention of the spirit?

Sealed into the artist's landscape

the florescent glow is a profound coloration

of longing. I am privileged to purchase it.

I am privileged to love these animals the artist never saw.

Their translation here, fantastical:

the part of unrecoiled dreams that follows one

through downtown traffic, grocery line,

office memorandum.

And surely, because the painting is successful

my own fantasy of the jungle resides in

the heartbeat of the humidity--one's need

to take the offerings of the unconscious

and engage with those potent images of a land

existing wildly better without my post-colonial adjectives.

From the fantastical I also know

that since my mother died in a car accident

I believe even less in any god and more in natural forces,

such as steam and ash; the closest articulation

of my belief being the actualization of one's pulse--this

humble poem, that small painting.

Or my impulse to purchase this painting

could be more original .

Perhaps that is why the smell of turpentine

I know from my father's hands and studio

makes me reel. I put my nose up to the paint's density

and inhale the scent of home.

The artist's translation and my own. Luxuriant and testing.

    The Glass Bracelets

I know I can only speak for myself

but after reading a simple story in The News

wish I could speak for a ninety-four-year-old woman

who on a day of the full moon of Magha in 1907,

at age seven, was led by her parents

to the Saundatti Temple in Karnataka

and given to the Hindu goddess Yellamma:

the childish glass arm bangles broken,

a nuptual necklace given her--

wedded to the diety Dev, Murali must never

marry a mortal, has never washed or cut

her long hair, a stiff mat of gray--her

duty was forever to be fucked

by those who come to the Temple.

At onset of menstruation the child was,

and still is, auctioned for the privilege of

tearing her hymen often times

by one with syphilis or gonorrhea--

virgins believed to be a certain cure.

It is difficult for me to like men at times,

any man, when such atrocities are sanctioned

by the religious. Atrocities for male pleasure.

And I doubt a woman concocted

the legend of this goddess. I am fucking mad

and want my daughters

to never leave our small Brooklyn apartment

though I know any room can be the residence

of secrets--like that of the man in Ocala, Florida

infecting six of his fourteen children

with venereal disease, fathering his daughter's babies,

beating their faces, beating their faces. This

while the religious target abortion clinics

and rude art. Who

can believe in a god in such a world

when god is made by man for men--I

will not respect a moment of silence

in my children's public school for the sake

of semi-automatic politicians wishing to purchase votes

with their small public piety.

And if you think this is not a poem

because I've ranted without benefit of a metaphor

think again: the story of Murali

is the story of any infant female or male

until the arteries of the status quo, of the silent,

of those who silence, or those who seek

solution in prayer, of those who limit choices--

until the varicose veins of the "religiously correct"

are slit and drawn. Until then

you, reader, are the five-year-old boy,

genitals severed and flesh neatly

folded back into a tiny cunt, or

the ten-year-old girl with second-stage syphilis

now lodged in her central nervous system.

Hear me: I will not pray. I will not pray.

    Found

The New York Times 1/16/94

As soon as Lek sees her photograph

the quiet twelve-year-old girl

jumps up and pokes wildly at her image.

She has never told her life story

but now belts it out: "This girl

was sold by her mother." Louder:

"This girl was ten and she was sold

to a woman called Auntie. Auntie

put her in a brothel--beat her--

made her work." Lek grabs a stick

and begins striking the air

with each new point:

"This girl had lots of pains.

She had terrible headaches. She

cried a lot." Lek works every day.

There were many men, Thai

and foreign. After two years

Auntie sold her to a bar owner.

    If You Speak

"They had everything to gain by keeping silent."

George Hicks, Comfort Women

If you speak you will become

what they made you: that cunt.

That cunt attached to a body

serving sometimes fifty men a day

for the Empire so the men

would not be killed by the bullets

the eyes hear

when the ears feel. If you

speak you will become the girl, fourteen,

fucked by six soldiers on the kitchen floor

in front of your papa and mama

then thrown into a truck.

The girl who didn't know

what they were doing, who didn't have

her monthly blood yet. Didn't understand

except it hurt,

it hurt her breathing, it hurt her father.

That her cunt remained a cunt.

Could never be privates ,

or vagina --her own body .

A towel and uniform. A mat.

Thirty men a day. Fifty on the front. If

you speak you will become

first person singular.

The little girl who poured mud

into cups for dolls. Jumped rope.

Fetched grandma's spectacles. If you speak

you become trash. You collaborate

with the conscience, become a mouth.

Become the fetus you pulled out

of your own body

in the common shower between scabby soldiers

and a trip to the doctor's

to see about this bleeding. This

afterbirth.Was it? What was it?

You will begin to know what

it is. To recall the gynecologist

who allowed soldiers to watch the exam.

Yes, then fucked you for free.

You are made to wear kimono. To speak

nihongo which is not part of your body

so in a way it's okay. It's better

because it is not how you'd speak to grandpa.

If, if--

You can tell everyone,

the soldiers did not take my little sister,

the soldiers took me.

If you could speak about this

would it be chronological or against

the orderliness of sequence. Could it

change the history of the Greater East Asian

Co-Prosperity Sphere? Would your

seventy-year-old tongue recall how oranges tasted

before they changed your Korean name to Japanese

and called you a comfort woman --

if you speak it means you remember.

Copyright © 1999 Kimiko Hahn. All rights reserved.