Ode to the Cupboard Filled with

Plastic Bags 

by Huan He

  • The strange thing about apartments is that their
  • kitchens look the same: elementary school wood
  • a jury of cabinets, the same years of plastic bags
  • my mother keeps tightly wound as her hair bun. 
  • Keeper of licorice dreams, each a Miyazaki sketch
  • holding miniature worlds, brimming with Hi-chews
  • and dragon fruit and the black duck eggs that come
  • in packs of six. Like No-Face, who had had a face
  • but nobody remembered, each bag is pennies hoarded—
  • stuff, stuff, stuffed into itself— until they crown,
  • screaming for air:
        • The first one came from a mother named
        • 99 Ranch, a tall woman who wore church clothes
        • and blood red nails and believed in the sanctity
        • of children. In the storm, she could be found
        • slow dancing with God, the sun-kissed clouds,
        • the mourning crow on telephone wire; the second
        • from a newlywed named Costco, a nervous girl
        • who grew up making sure her shoelaces were tight
        • and found solace writing down her thoughts in a
        • leaf-filled diary; the third and the fourth from the twins
        • CVS and Safeway, who spoke in the tides of the Pacific
        • Gyre, donning glittered jetsam as they danced to Diana
        • Ross at the roller-rink: they can’t see us if we spin into oblivion,
        • they can’t hurt us if we are the wind.
  • The strange thing about apartments is that their
  • kitchens look the same: elementary school wood
  • a jury of cabinets, the same years of plastic bags
  • my mother keeps tightly wound as her hair bun. 
  • Keeper of licorice dreams, each a Miyazaki sketch
  • holding miniature worlds, brimming with Hi-chews
  • and dragon fruit and the black duck eggs that come
  • in packs of six. Like No-Face, who had had a face
  • but nobody remembered, each bag is pennies hoarded—
  • stuff, stuff, stuffed into itself— until they crown,
  • screaming for air:
        • The first one came from a mother named
        • 99 Ranch, a tall woman who wore church clothes
        • and blood red nails and believed in the sanctity
        • of children. In the storm, she could be found
        • slow dancing with God, the sun-kissed clouds,
        • the mourning crow on telephone wire; the second
        • from a newlywed named Costco, a nervous girl
        • who grew up making sure her shoelaces were tight
        • and found solace writing down her thoughts in a
        • leaf-filled diary; the third and the fourth from the twins
        • CVS and Safeway, who spoke in the tides of the Pacific
        • Gyre, donning glittered jetsam as they danced to Diana
        • Ross at the roller-rink: they can’t see us if we spin into oblivion,
        • they can’t hurt us if we are the wind.
Based in Los Angeles, Huan He is a PhD candidate in American Studies & Ethnicity and a poet at the University of Southern California. His poetry explores race, sexuality, and belonging from the perspective of a queer Chinese American raised by the prairies. He is the author of a forthcoming chapbook, Sandman (2022), which won the Diode Editions Chapbook Prize. His poems appear/are forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, A Public Space, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Palette Poetry, wildness, RHINO, and DIALOGIST. His Twitter is @huan_direction.
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