Timothy Yu

Two poems from Timothy Yu’s 77 Chinese Dreams

followed by a note on the author

39

Hello, yellow peril! You’re always near.
Too many (you said       we read) to be told apart.
We shrivel in the light,
bare-ass Timothy packed away for plunder,
so long! Our barred zones are no ingrates,
coddling us with their hate

from when we’re born. Our hair is tufted off
gently: from shooter to computer man,
we never get tired.
You’re afraid, we’re hit. You murder us with love,
wifey, lackey, since we never can invent
the forms of our desire,

or desire: unmake us: we will stay undressed,
our sallow skin polished like a face,
animate lover,
passing your testing, who have been born to test,
your horsehair engine runs. All look the same,
under the covers.

 

Timothy Yu

 

42

You con artist, tongue of a toad, inane
with bigotry & theft: will you take me
as a number one son?
Am I an I by how you reckon one,
spitted, wretched? I kneel before you in pain
(I am killed; I beg, I flee)

your hatred is doubled: hear them chanting—Go.
I fear. I shrink in fear. Call full blaze down
with you as instrument
unstrung, a craven win, a row of tents.
I have half-mast & bluster to revision you
for burning me to ground.

You feed on hatred, and you fake as strong.
Hate winged me, not a person you can grab
or erase with a brand.
Think of it, boss: a bleeding twin: a hand
that blisters rich: stop, here, as if wound wrong
and sprung back to scab.

 

Timothy Yu

 

Timothy Yu is the author of a poetry collection, 100 Chinese Silences (Les Figues Press, reissued by punctum books), and two scholarly books, Diasporic Poetics: Asian Writing in the United States, Canada, and Australia (Oxford University Press) and Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry since 1965 (Stanford University Press). He is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First-Century American Poetry and Nests and Strangers: On Asian American Women Poets (Kelsey Street Press). His work has appeared in Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, Fence, and The New Republic. He is a professor of English and Asian American studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.