My Boyfriend Comes Home From Wars Every Day
Live performance, sound with poem reading
Performed at: Feb 20, 2022, Los Angeles, Praxinoscope
This poem is the artist pulling out stuff from their archive, looking specifically at things that happened in December historically. The work is about myth, belief, immigrants, war, and how the complexity is embedded in intimate relationships.
Instruction: Play the sound, read the text (if you may, read it out loud), and play the sound, read the text, in sequence.
my boyfriend, J, just came back from war
J brought a bag of spinach, pasta, Mozzarella cheese, and tomatoes to my place after work
I brought some crackers and mixed black tea with soy milk
J brought a book I like
J fried the noodles and boiled the vegetables
we talked about Snow Country by Kawabata Yasunari at our dining table
a polished thick wood round table
we went for a walk after dinner
in the best stargazing month
J is an engineer
he is everything I need
we snuck into The Island
we got around the facial recognition for this gated community
by following the car in front of us
it was a brilliant starry night
we laughed so loud
we don’t need the moon
J was holding my hand when I saw the reflection of the stars
shining in the artificial canals
we walked closer to the water
the stars were the beaks of ducks
I took out my phone camera, lowered the exposure
so the machine eyes only saw the beaks
I made a picture of us in front of the galaxy of beaks
we don’t need stars
stars can be beaks of ducks
my boyfriend J comes back from wars every day
we live in Los Angeles
have been planning to travel back to China to visit our families
I have been applying for a US visa on my laptop
J has been making aircrafts for the DOD on his desktop
we work from home
he can make aircrafts in his bedroom
Los Angeles doesn’t rain
every day is a starry day
private jets, public airplanes, drones, rockets, military jets, satellites launching
Los Angeles hold all of these in its sky
we don’t need stars
stars can be the fire, the light of these man-made machines in the sky
J gives me hugs after wars/work every day
J doesn’t wear uniform to work
J doesn’t know how to hold a gun
J doesn’t have a superior who orders him to salute
he doesn’t know where his aircrafts have been to yesterday, or where they will go today, or next week
J doesn’t kill people
even though sometimes I imagine
one day i will learn one of the stars I saw was J’s aircraft
going on a mission to throw a bomb on top of my Chinese parents