“BRUSHING MY TEETH AT THE EDGE OF ELIZABETH PLACE” and Other Poems

By Gian Lao

Michelle Nguyen - Feasting (2020), Oil on canvas, 36 x 36 inches
Image description: A still-life painting of fruits, including half a papaya, a pink dragonfruit, a pear, and half a grapefruit. The fruits are displayed against a blue background with pastel-pink grass blades and willow leaves. A colony of white ants swarm the fruit display while two butterflies with black and yellow wings hover over the fruits. 

Ants

“…every step of your troubled descent
was toward me. I was waiting
in the future for such a woman.”

— Stephen Dunn, “Juarez”

In the morning my entire floor is blue
and in the evening, dark blue.
I am learning new words for fluorescent
and failing to say “fiber glass barriers”
in any other way. Neither windows
nor walls. Myself a fish examining
aquarium glass. I talk to my printer
and clap and cheer when I need him
to not fail, as if watching a toddler
whose knees might buckle. Every year
felt eternal then. Seven AND A HALF
I used to say. And now, everything
is approximation. Even the friendships. 
I want to send a cake with a card
to the first person who frowns at me
and brings me back to the world. 
There are ants on the desk
who spend a day traversing 
to the other side of the desk. 
My screen the only glow for miles
of carpet. The country fresh 
air freshener threatens to truly freshen. 
Parachute you to some Danish field
of azaleas. I could shout anything
without consequence. But I stay
quiet because it feels like power. 
I begin a secret life only the printer sees. 
And the ants. The Chocnut led them here
and now I have learned much,
directing their traffic with the remnants
from my own survival. Why do we take
people out to eat, especially when
what we want is to marry them? 
In this room, alone, I began eating 
and soon, the ants kept me company. 
What we attract by simply keeping alive. 
Which is to say, I remember Dunn and how 
I found you. You remind me of hardship
too. What hungers I must have 
endured. What directionless trails 
I must have walked to meet you
and say you are on my mind—
which is why I take a minute
to adore the circling ants
before I take the long road to yours
just to tell you the exact same things.

Michelle Nguyen - Growing Pains (2020), Oil on canvas, 30 x 60 inches
Image description: A surrealist landscape painting of a blue, single-storey home with an overgrown garden of pink, yellow, green, and orange blades of grass and leafy willow bushes. Through the window of the house, we can see the magenta silhouette of a figure with its arms on its hips and a blue birdcage against the pale yellow light. The silhouette of a large, dark, crow-like bird sits on the roof. Outside the house are four female figures. In the foreground, on the left, a nude woman with pale yellow skin and white hair lies on the grass, a monarch butterfly covering her face while a fawn is curled up between her body and right arm. Behind her and standing atop the pile of grass is a headless woman in a long, flowy, button-up, white dress with long sleeves. Her right hand is raised as though to feel for the absence of her head. To the right of the woman lying down, a fair-skinned woman with long hair squats with her back facing us. Next to her sits a woman with long, wavy, black hair and purplish skin. She has the face of a skull, and she is smoking a cigarette. Her arms are dark purple in color, and in her right hand she holds the mask of a brown face.

BRUSHING MY TEETH AT THE EDGE OF ELIZABETH PLACE

Me and my bare-nosed, bare-mouthed inhale
of Makati. Don’t you agree this city smells
different when it is cooling down? The day
is an orchestra of noises and dusk is the solo
of every motorcycle racing to get somewhere.
You smell like the sun, we say to a person
carrying the loosened backpack of a long day. 
The early morning is the past and mid-morning 
is the present. That makes us a multitude of selves. 
Before I step in the office where I am only 
who I currently am, who I currently love,
a riff from a song reminds me of an old self. 
A second voice you couldn’t help but sing
even with a first voice long gone. What remains
the same as we sleep in each other’s beds
if not this early morning? The same skyline
with every person we have loved and failed 
to love. Laughter blares from a jeepney’s horn, 
a mother hawks breakfast while her son’s eyes 
are still learning to open. It smells of bread
and coffee and toothpaste and I am brushing
against the edge of a decade. The city’s echoes
touching everything I ever was. Get ready now
for the years behind you. The present is only 
a transit to the past. This beginning of the day
as if anything could still happen.

Michelle Nguyen - Afterparty (2016), Oil on canvas, 30 x 60 inches
Image description: An impressionist-style painting in bold, bright colors of a lively party at a double-storey home. The figures in the painting are mostly indistinguishable, some not even having any facial features. They are also depicted in different art styles, for instance, the two white figures on the left are only outlined, in contrast to everyone else in the frame. A crowd of people gather outside of the house, which has overgrown shrubbery climbing up the front of the home. We can also see some people inside the house, and there is even a pair of pink legs dangling from the second-floor window.

A Poem from the Isolated to the Isolated

When the bedside lamp is the only light that remains,
I wave to the distant windows kind enough to leave
a light on. Room with a glow like a soul within a body.
A few of us could make a constellation. 
Enough of us could simulate what we knew
of the city. A window keeps us from each other
and makes us whole. A network of bare faces
lit by a fire in a screen, palms against the glass,
yearning for the other side. The light means Wait
and everything else we need it to mean. 
We who touch our phones, our chests, breathe
a treasured breath. We who point the camera
at ourselves to prove we are living
even to the neighbors we’ve never met. 

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Gian Lao is a poet, essayist, and speechwriter from Manila, Philippines. His work has appeared in various publications, including CNN Philippines, ANCX, and Esquire Philippines. His self-published first book of poetry "All the Winters of My Body" and a collaborative zine "What We Can See of the Sky" are both available for free on gianlao.com. 

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Michelle Nguyen is an oil painter whose works examine themes of death and grief. She was born in Toronto, Canada, but currently lives and works in Vancouver. She has an undergraduate degree in Environmental Design from the University of British Columbia.

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