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    Bite Hard
    Bite Hard
    Bite Hard
    Ebook152 pages1 hour

    Bite Hard

    By Justin Chin

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    About this ebook


    The first collection by award-winning performance artist/poet Justin Chin. In Bite Hard, Chin explores his identity as an Asian, a gay man, an artist, and a lover. He rails against both his own life experiences and society's limitations and stereotypes with scathing humor, bare-bones honesty, and unblinking detail. Whether addressing "what really goes on in the kitchen of Chinese restaurants" or a series of ex-boyfriends, all named Michael, Chin displays his remarkable emotional range and voice as a poet. His raw, incantatory, stream-of-consciousness poems confront issues of race, desire, and loss with a compelling urgency that reflects his work as in performance, speaking directly to an audience. Throughout this collection, Chin demonstrates his uncanny ability to convey thought-provoking viewpoints on a variety of controversial subjects.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherManic D Press, Inc.
    Release dateJul 3, 2018
    ISBN9781945665158
    Bite Hard
    Author

    Justin Chin

    Justin Chin lives in San Francisco. His work has appeared in many anthologies and magazines. He is the author of a book of essays, Mongrel, and a book of poetry, Bite Hard (Manic D Press), which was a 1998 Lambda Literary Award Finalist.

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      Book preview

      Bite Hard - Justin Chin

      Lingual Guilts

      Bitter

      Bitterness comes as revolution,

      cyclic, a snake

      biting its tail scales,

      a dog nipping its tail hairs, bitter,

      continuity achieved by subtlety,

      perceptions played out,

      questions followed by answers,

      ask, answer, some days

      you will know, others

      you wake to nothing of the same,

      the smell of washed grass,

      I have this theory: the rain

      each drop, big as bees, falls

      with a velocity to bore into the ground,

      tilling the grass smell out

      of the air pockets in the earth,

      the pine cones and the sea smell

      saltiness washed clean with Absolut,

      this is another country,

      this is a different place,

      the water tastes different

      and the Indian money changer

      with the stained dhoti and turban

      smelling of coconut oils and incense,

      sitting cross-legged at his pavement box store

      respects you for your money,

      and your whiteness stands out

      like wine stains on the hotel sheets,

      where I spilled a half bottle

      as we wrestled, our naked bodies

      pressed against the sweaty halfjest,

      facing the expansiveness

      of the night and the buzzing

      traffic, plays

      its points of red and yellow

      against the window panes

      while we lay watching the stars

      quiver and descend to inches

      before our eyes as strangers

      start to sprout hair all over

      their arms, faces, legs and slowly

      turn into large orangutans driving taxicabs,

      and the universe churns around us

      like a ride at Disneyland,

      disappearing into flat

      unbroken scheme.

      These were the lost years,

      writing really bad poems,

      arguing with border guards,

      this Walkman is not new,

      there’s no tax anyway,

      reading incomprehensible Beckett plays,

      discussing Gide and Orton

      tripping on dope bought from the bellboy,

      cheap wine from the Japanese departmental store,

      working on my tan,

      trying to add inches to my arms,

      listening to you detail your research

      on crossculturalisms, here,

      as we get off at the station

      built to look like a mosque

      with the grandeur of bright mosaic

      tiles spiraling up dome structures

      and intricately craved wood

      panelings to hide the grime

      and the weary travelers,

      rudely shouting at everybody.

      In the restroom, I squat

      hovering over the hole in the floor

      trying to work the uneasiness

      out of my stomach as I hear scraping

      of feet in the stall beside me,

      under the partition, there are two pairs

      of shoes, moving in a slow, frantic,

      desperate dance, trying to carve

      a small slice of validity, to find their heaven

      in this hemisphere of spent contradictions,

      in this two feet of shit-odored

      space, they have found their judgment

      and I leave them

      to find a pay phone,

      my father tells me that the sultana is dead,

      the TV programmings have been replaced

      with Koranic dirges and everybody

      is expected to wear black armbands:

      mandatory mourning will be checked on

      by the police, so he wears an armband even

      while playing all eighteen holes of golf,

      to be Chinese here is a bloody crime,

      he says and tells me to come home soon.

      Clutching our tickets to the crosswise

      third-class seats, we slouch backwards

      towards the darkness, feeling

      the close and warmth of our bodies

      disentangle and the distance, marked

      by the ashes of burning cane fields sticking

      to our flesh, the attraction between two bodies

      defined beyond gravity

      grows heavy as the night falls,

      and waving kampung children

      accompanied by their elders and parents

      give way to paddy fields and tobacco plantations,

      lit by night lights and the glow

      of the owner’s small huts,

      speed in front of our field of vision

      hushing us to sleep, until

      the feeling of urgency wakes me,

      heart beating like slacks in a bicycle chain,

      I find your body twitching ecstatically

      while you rub yourself and metal shards

      trickle out of your pants zipper

      and turn rusty as I catch them

      in my palm before they hit the floor,

      the red dust etches itself into the

      lines of my hands and the Nonya woman

      sitting across the aisle, facing me,

      takes my hands, spits into them,

      the metal cuts into my hands

      and I am left holding the remnants

      of our sex, like an offering

      to saints unknown, gods unbelieved,

      searching for the spiritual

      in the physicalness of your body,

      dust weaves a maze into our bones,

      femur holding suspended fragments

      of torn secrecy, jealousy, bitter,

      hip bone framing the ravishing, all

      held in place with ligaments

      fragile as pins and cobwebs,

      straining to the lure of hunger,

      as we make our way in the splash

      of early morning sunlight, yellow

      throwing long drawn out shadows

      on the walls, through the first-class carriage,

      through the recycled air-conditioned air,

      smelling of sweating passengers, bleary-eyed

      agog at the English-dubbed, the original

      Cantonese captioned, kung fu movie

      on the small TV screen, dangling

      like bait from the ceiling,

      to the dining car where

      the overpriced cheese sandwiches melt

      deliciously sticky and rancid.

      The pull of the station brings us

      to our destination,

      as we set on the platform,

      a swarm of brown-skinned boys, all

      flashing their brightest Colgate smiles

      want to take your backpack, help you

      find a hotel, take you to lunch,

      let you take them to dinner;

      I am not an entity here,

      I am competition in their minds,

      more likely some cheap slut, a paid whore

      who can be bested easily, they know that.

      We find our regular boarding house

      and the German expatriate,

      a longtime resident, greets us and displays

      the new boy he picked up in the park,

      gave a good scrubbing to and dressed

      in neatly pressed schoolboy outfits

      for as long as the skinny wide-eyed

      fawning boy wants to give handjobs.

      The boy offers to do your laundry,

      the English woman, a new resident,

      invites us for a drink up on the roof

      this evening, everybody seems glad

      to see you again and the voices

      flood into us like madness, pulling

      us into the tenderness of untruth.

      I invent space, poison, bitter,

      snake bites, safety,

      fester, if you boil roses

      for twenty hours with a teaspoon

      of fine sugar, stirring

      clockwise, then steaming your face

      in the saccharin fumes,

      you will be loved, I invent

      sweeping, mementos, maturity

      and still, nothing

      moves, stillness holds your tongue

      and it breaks into thorns

      sharp enough to pierce through

      penitent flesh, wrapping itself

      like a python squeezing the last

      out of what’s left of the moon

      reflected on the river as the peddlers

      calmly row their sampans laden

      with tourist trinkets and vegetables

      home; I know the temples

      of gold and saffron

      that burn incense and powders

      on the tongue, deviled,

      cutting sinners to jewels

      washed in front of Buddhas

      with smooth nipples and Egyptian eyes

      that said stay

      and you did.

      Lying in the room, cast

      a strange orange by the cellophane paper

      over the windows, we laid plans,

      mapping the fluidity of your life

      and mine: I will go south,

      to the East Coast to the sea, home

      eventually, you will stay and try find

      another boy: stranger angels

      have beset us, and trains

      are stories of sacraments

      melting on the tongue, holy,

      unspoken, blessed, and thoroughly

      immaterial, totally bloodless,

      the middleman calls,

      there is no hardness

      left, your body,

      opaque, dense as familiarity,

      leaves no stains, no inventions;

      the German has found a new boy,

      the train is delayed:

      an elephant caused a derailment,

      the platform is wheels, nothing

      can hurt, I float in sea foam,

      fine rain and bitter salt,

      disenchanted, drawn to decency, shaping

      pictures to memory that redefine

      visions, transforming virginities,

      pure, burning

      in the smell of cloves and lines

      etched into your palm, kissed

      with no exhilarating lips, yes,

      it will be a suffering,

      this is the tao of the situation, bitterness,

      balance achieved by the necessity

      of lies, all these lingual guilts,

      cruel, bitter, bite hard

      this morning, by the window watching

      the monsoon splatter itself against the panes,

      I watched the neighbor children

      splashing in the puddles, holding

      plastic bags hoping to catch tadpoles

      that will later

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