The Engineer of Vertical Frontiers
O inauspicious birth.
I was born a donkey, a capon, then a snotsized
polliwog, born & snorted up a horse’s
nostril as it drank from a pond.
Then a foulsome stinker Crusoe washed
onto our shore, crying “Orright!” which Pa,
a lover of all things Brit, christened me:
Orright. I’m Orright.
All noble reckoning pointed to a white-
beamed path, a CEO Pa (deemed a fearsome
foe re-educated to his grave),
a swanly Ma (a roader’s wife, too vain
they cried & drowned her in her own toilettes)
who tenderly scraped my ears of wax with a sterling
toothy spoon stippled with my surname.
Now, I’m not deserving a name.
I’m a titbit Xiao, a dollop easily bored,
A trolloping doer, I loll & gag,
at the teargas factory, at the denture factory,
at the heart ticker factory.
I’m not fond of people, see,
though I’m quite fond of the idea of people.
Inside my bunker, a belljar in every room.
Inside each belljar, a cloudcapt city of silksack
buildings solar-powered by a field of weedsized
turbines so air will be purer than virgins.
Dumb Ideas, Pa’s cadaver wheezes.
Go back to the factory of dentures, Orright.
Work hard, Orright, work hard.
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About the Author
Cathy Park Hong’s second book, Dance Dance Revolution, was awarded the Barnard Women Poets Prize. She is currently working on her third collection, tentatively titled Frontierlands.
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