Foreword

The time we spent in various degrees of isolation & quarantine in 2020-2022 seem like they took place just yesterday & an eternity ago. And each of us experienced our own journey of loss, grief, solitude & fear during those years. Put a Comma in Front of a Person by Kristina Erny tells the story of a young mother in a Chinese quarantine hotel. But in some ways, these poems belong to us all. Because in our isolation, we shared so much. And we still do.

What is possible when we pay attention to the miracles & the horrors all around us–the “perfect orbits” & “the empty freeway”? Kristina reminds us that isolation provides opportunities to connect with one another in unexpected ways, on the most human levels–through contact from two sides of a computer screen or a closed door to the curiosity of a child & the long hours & fortitude of young motherhood, from windows & carefully kept schedules to the “parenthesis” of our bodies & the “breathing [of our loved ones which] smells like dreams.” We held each other & waited to see who would survive & who would not. We waited. And while we waited, in solitude, animals gathered fearlessly as we watched from our windows. Space & time seemed strange and we noticed previously unseen things about ourselves, one another & about the world.

These poems ask universal questions about life, love, time & survival while conveying the bittersweet beauty of small spaces & long hours with elegant & visceral language. They build worlds that are both familiar & unimaginable. We are reminded of what we share as human beings, how close we have come to annihilation & that anything is possible if we are alive & if we continue to reach for each other.

Joan Kwon Glass
2024

翘足引领：qiào zú yǐn lǐng
    idiom: waiting expectantly on tiptoes; to look forward eagerly
    to long for

This is a place that already tastes
like packets of fermented veggies
chopped mustard greens
rice porridge,
a hard boiled egg.

Before airplanes began combing
their wreckage under the stars,
people walked, or took a boat,
bundles piled and pulled
on a cart.

A border is merely
a seam, a question mark.

Quarantine hotel windows
dotted with condensation.
My heart like a plastic bag,
steam wrapped around food
delivered in two stacked trays
outside our room with a hard knock
sometime between eight and nine.

My daughter plays a game at guessing
whether there will be red beans
in the morning buns

or not.

Three cats languid in July humidity.
A fountain bloomed with algae. Two days in,
last night lights of the city hum
like ghosts.

What I can carry on my back
is all I can carry at a given time.

My daughter builds a room
for herself behind the blinds,
she says MOM FROM HERE
THE BUILDINGS LOOK LIKE
TRAYS OF FOOD

My daughter doesn't flinch
when I tell her how many days
we have left.

My daughter calls me
to the window to see
that the cats we counted
and watched for an hour earlier
are gone.

The page in my notebook says
we should have been done
with crafts at five.

She already put an X
through another day.

Home is the shape made between the bodies
of the beloved.

We try to stay awake until it's dark.

I invite her into the parenthesis
my body makes with the wall.

Read until her breathing smells like dreams.

ALIENS
    Shanghai, China, July 2022

A life is something you have to start
the daughter dances with suitcase, spins
asks the woman to LOOK LOOK UP
see her dance again, though the door is still
locked & the hallway sprayed daily with bleach
ask whatever questions you want you won't get an answer now
she said today I HATE TIME
you asked why, she said TOO MANY TYPES
I WISH WE WERE ALL ON THE SAME ONE
here it is morning and somewhere else
it's time to climb down from the cul-de-sac's trees
you are making coffee for the second time
soon you will get up to pour box milk from the breakfast
tied in a double-layered plastic bag left on
the glass-topped table outside the quarantine hotel door
she refused the bao buns again today
MOMMY COME to the window to watch the man
in the straw hat sweep leaves with a bush-
broom, after a descent of dragonflies
the suitcase has wheels, makes perfect orbits, creates, then loops,
the moon, astronaut, physicist, great incomparable eye, who calls all
to see this little alien, rolling back and forth and back

早上好

What rose over the city like an egret
who forgot the marsh, traded water for wires
daring the sun in a contest of drunks

The mother takes a deep breath
fails to drum up her peace

A morning less halogen, more
noxious spray up the hotel's hallway,
peppers everything crusty white

How to make a makeshift home
floating on the quarantine hotel's twelfth floor

Dare to muscle time to move faster
hurled one more day around the sun

Minutes stolen from a life, a marathon
walked in place over eleven days

She was mistaken
Just another mother
at war with the screens

The mosquitos get in
through whatever cracks they can

A morning like two whole eggs
cracked and peeled, slowly eaten

This is also the Earth

That early drummer knocks
ready to swab a throat

Somewhere else people ride in cars
move freely in the world

Get shot in the mall
holding a bag from Dick's

Put a Comma in Front of a Person

This wifi is speechless,
wobbly, like cabbage

soaked in oil. Show me a happy
vegetarian and I'll show you the door.

One floor down my husband and sons
listen as my daughter and I dance on their heads.

Day One we arrived here whipped with light and after
my name was called first, deplaned, and walked

through every corded line into the bunker
where, through sheets of plastic,

a lady in a double-layered hazmat suit,
light blue, knocked the sanitary wipes

to the floor and rubbed her rubber-coated
hands again in sanitizer gel, then jammed

the wooden swab into the back of my throat.
A scanned QR allows your entry. Wait here.

Which Chinese character means Shanghai.
Pudong. Jinqiao. The man in the rubber gloves

scrolls. Now complete the same form for all
the other members of your family. Type your info

onto dotted lines, passport number, government ID,
do you have the QR code? Universal gesture for I don't know.

Stand in line, lean sweaty against a life's
possessions, seventeen pieces of luggage,

sneeze after your chemical mist.
What do I miss? The silhouettes of horses

driving home on 68. But honestly, nothing,
yet. My children laugh at the police escort,

the empty freeway, us the only ones
on the bus. The sogged felt in the entryway

of this worn out Novotel, two cucumbers
delivered with dinner. Turn to the WeChat

thread I click on obsessively
to translate, translate, wanting to know

the name of the upper-right-hand-quadrant’s
mystery meat. Outside the window,

the train's a long sentence. Tomorrow I'll be
awoken by the bleat of a plastic phone

Hello? My daughter handles the receiver,
My temperature is 36.5. Yes, daughter's

is 35.8. Clunk of old plastic, long beep
beep beep. After they're gone. Check the thread.

78 messages—last one from the lobby.
This thread is now dead.

Report by press O. 8:00, 13:00, 19:00. The windows across
and below us are silent. My daughter dances

and wants me to make another video. SEND IT TO
GRANDMA, MOMMY. I transcribe the poem she composes

about a sea crab. PINCHERS PINCH
LIKE HUMAN FINGERS SNAP. I CRAWL

LIKE A TYPEWRITER CLICKS.
There are cars parked in the street

covered in yellow dust. A few lorry trucks
piled high with salvaged metal. Quarantine facility 30

used to be called Novotel, and this morning
the skyline of Pudong had light rain

thrust across her face. At least this place
isn't full of ants. Highlight and double tap

to translate.


*italicized lines in this poem are automatically generated WeChat translations from August 18-20th, 2022 Weixin (WeChat) chat thread for residents in Novotel Quarantine Facility 30, Shanghai, China.

On August 21st the WeChat group was disbanded abruptly by the authorities because residents were expressing outrage over the changed quarantine rules and regulations, bad wifi, and food quality.

After the WeChat group was shut down we had to report our 3x daily temperatures via the ancient hotel phone.

You are a dangerous poet, I am trying to be one
    after Tishani Doshi (title from "A God at the Door")

After the rain, immediately, a flock,
no, a horde, no, a hovering,
of dragonflies

With my cheek pressed to the glass
through a window cracked
I yell your name again

Later on grainy screens, glitched
wobbly FaceTime, we joke of the drones
broadcast BE PATIENT!
RESIST YOUR PRIVATE URGES
FOR FREEDOM

GO BACK INSIDE

Quick tap, go back, watch footage
quickly passed, pass

Scrubbed,

in a blink
they were gone,

and the cicadas for a while
sounded like how they sound
in horror movies
or at home

I am already tired

of counting street cats
and waiting for lunch

for temperature
checks

I have been in this room
for four days, for the time
being, my child and I
watch alien men

climb in and out
of a plastic water tank
on the roof of the hotel
across the street

America
    after Solmaz Sharif

you broke
any
right to
promise
All I
am is
your child
white mutt
dragged up
through
history
your choss
your loss
a noose
I can
slip off
at the
last sec
you won
but now
dead al-
batross
I left
as a child
once and
then again
and again
and I
never
missed you
not once
not now

Portrait at 39
    after Kamilah Aisha Moon

Tongue numb from Sichuan peppercorns
and translating my name
into three languages. I have kept
plants and babies watered
and alive in another home
this year. Read under weighted
blanket until my daughter
and I fall asleep. I cook all I can
in a single pot. Still eat rice
every day. Love walks, poems,
and people who write them.
You know I'll talk to you in the hallway
until I make myself late. Speak
my eyebrows high up into my bangs.
Diamonds in my cheeks that only one
of my children mined too. Eyes
that squint because I can't kick
the habit of not turning pages
in the dark. The next morning line
them with hot pink. Turn off
the overhead lights. Obsess every shadow
in lost corners of my house, call you
to come see, see how they like dancing.
Laugh so loud the windows shake.

Everywhere We Look, There We Are
    title after Cameron Awkward-Rich

Sun amped to quarrel today, and all
the women walking street-level
look like umbrellas.

I'm not a creep, but I am looking
out my window. Hours ago, my daughter
entered from the bathroom and yelled

MAMA WHERE ARE YOU
Day six of a ten-day quarantine,
where had she thought I'd gone?

An internet in cahoots
with the government
steals us senile inch by inch.

Camel colored seaweed, lace fragments
soaked in garlic and oil, little flecks
of green onion, mound of white rice.

At night we pull the curtains, shut out
Shanghai's light. We are somewhere old

but also utterly new, what with our squashed
tongues, the woman in the hallway

knocking, pointing with her latexed hand
at the clipboard, then at my sternum
YOU, THIS, THIS YOU?

On Feeling Seen by Animal Planet or The Only Thing on Chinese TV is a Show About Puppies and Old Reruns of Track and Field

wolf mother howls
turtle mother hides
pigeon mother pecks
octopus mother dies

python mother smothers
parrot mother preens
beaver mother shelters
orangutan mother screams

rat mother hoards
peacock mother struts
dog mother herds
worm mother has guts

penguin mother provides
mole mother saves
barnacle mother clings
honey badger mother craves

crow mother tarots
cat mother cleans
seahorse mother is both
bear mother wants sleep

budgie mother tsks
cow mother drinks
fox mother plans
whale mother sings

horse mother grooms
sloth mother chills
dragon mother smokes
stork mother has bills

raccoon mother misbehaves
elephant mother keens
dolphin mother dotes
horsefly mother's mean

chameleon mother rolls her eyes
leech mother overthinks
squirrel mother remembers
harp seal mother leaves

wolverine mother fights
lion mother teaches
crab mother pinches tender
human mother creatures

Self Portrait with a Bowl of Noodles in 私房牛肉面
    金桥镇, 上海

The little girl with the baby fat
face and three pigtails holding
a plastic yellow cup.

Formica, peeling, sticks to contemplative
forearms and elbows. Who else is at home
in the corner shop next to a dentist,

massage parlor, Family Mart. Kin
with coolers of bottled ice tea,
soy milks, refreshed by sounds of men

watching game shows on phones,
twinkle clink of Tsingtao. Family-owned,
windows opaque. It's cold out.

Nothing Latinate, Anglo, or Romanized
has a name here, although some
receive the hospitality of a heavy plastic

menu with pictures of every dish. Wooden stools catch
on worn linoleum, steam fogs so the first bite is taken
sightless. You aren't ready for the taste.

Broth steeped for years, thick and more complex.
A universe dotted with oil. Chopped cilantro
not everyone likes. Bok choy, green onions, chopsticks, spoon.

I like myself

with a little vinegar and chili oil. Enough to make
a brow sweat. I like welcoming you in
through a glass door kicked open

by the three-year-old daughter
of the place. We slide sideways
between a four top and next to people

who ignore us. Scan, scroll, let's try something
new. Egg with stewed tomatoes.
Twenty beef jiaozi spiced with cumin.

Backbones jostled by kuaidi delivery
boys, stacked paper bowls in plastic
bags. I'm hungry. You better hope

there is a stool available,
and you are ready to feast.