#eric yip

Ma Tau Wai Road, Eric Yip

Star Ferry Pier, Eric Yip

The Mills, Eric Yip

broadway cinematheque by eric yip // the poetry review

How the word stands like an inverted tree, a refusal to obey the laws that birthed it. Or is it a proper tree 木 with its top chopped off? All my life I’ve wondered if my brain’s inverted, improper, asterisked with defects. Be honest bro, you straight 直 or bent 攣? Bent like a branch or straight like a trunk? Like a man? You like men? Ma said Don’t stand slanted 歪 like a girl. 歪 like 不正. Not proper. A man’s spine should be trunk-strong. Once, after a fight, she sat me down with a cup of fig soup. Tell me you’re not like those defective men. I looked her straight in the eye and said no.

What ends as yarn begins as drawn threads of silver wound onto bobbins by the chapped fingers of mothers. I know this because the exhibition says so. No more scores of machines clattering no cotton spun no cellulose lit gold under the lamp’s UV glow. One floor below I buy a cup of black sugar boba the price of minimum wage. In ten minutes I finish what took an hour to earn tapioca pearls included. It is Sunday and everything is middle-class even the weather. Yesterday I called my lover abroad. He told me he loved me and that he wanted to introduce me to his parents who do not know of my existence. I did not think much of it at the time but now sitting on a gunmetal bench in the atrium swarmed with families I wonder if I should acquiesce to his request. Above phantom machines continue to weave their invisible threads. History ticks by in eight-hour shifts. Soon I will leave this city tethered by feelings I wish to understand. If one day you find me gentrified and placid please remind me of what we have lost.

fricatives (eric yip)