Jennifer Fossenbell
It’s not about the Man, It’s about the Circumstances That Surround the Man
My fingers smelled like curry
as I watched a one small mongrel humping another
in a grove of trees off Jingmi Lu
Her face was surprisingly placid as she braced herself
and watched the traffic go by
In the taxi, I placed my hands on my lap and felt my stillness
I placed one hand over the other and that hand over my device
I stroked my device and thought about the devastation of nations
I thought about that small dog’s penis and questions of consent
I thought about the differences between the taxi driver and me
I resisted the urge to lift my fingers to my nose
take a whiff of what I had for lunch
I thought about the phrase “a sense of propriety,” mine and his
as he glanced at me in the mirror
I thought about passivity, mine and the dog’s,
and I thought about pride, mine and the nation’s
I thought about what we mean when we say exotic
Millions of my own countrymen are exotic to me now
And whether “exotic” or “erotic” are reciprocal relationships
I looked out the window into clusters of men
inside the groves of trees
and thought about what to do about the devastation
how to gather myself into a small force and apply it somewhere useful
how to bloody and salve, how to lay down, how not to lie down
how to resist the too-quick unburdening
It has to be personal
I looked at my screen and said it out loud:
It has to be personal.
The taxi driver glanced up, jerked his chin to one side
when he saw I wasn’t talking on the phone, embarrassed
by my exotic disclosure
This is just a start, I said to his eyes in the rear-view mirror.
Editor’s Note: This poem originally appeared on the blog Where Is The River. We do not usually post poems that have previously appeared elsewhere, but we did so inadvertently this time, and it’s silly to pull it.
Jennifer Fossenbell has co-translated two collections of Vietnamese poetry (Wild Under the Sky by Huu Thinh and The Human Field by Tran Quang Quy) and co-edited an anthology of writing about Hanoi (Strange Roots: Views of Hanoi). Her poems have been published in China and the U.S., most recently in Bad Code (a Beijing exhibition), Posit, Spittoon Literary Journal, Small Po[r]tions, AJAR, Yes Poetry, and Black Warrior Review. She lives in Beijing, where she works as a news editor.