THIS POEM USED TO BE A PARTY

but a virus is a dirty thing

return is hui
& hui is a box drawn inside a box.
a spell to make someone leave,
to make them go back
& be sick somewhere else
it’s easier to say people like me
but there are no people like me
just my people
every elder & small child,
                                                 every restaurateur & widow.
             if i had the ability i would gather
everyone in the box. not because it’s home, but because it
                     is safe. give them all to me,
       these children, these women,
these inside-out pussies,

these coolies, these chinadolls, these buddhaheads,
these chinks. these backward vaginas, these gook-eyed
             pancake faces,
these slant-eyes, these slopeheads, these bug-infested jellies,
these rotated cunts, these greasy zipperheads, these crime-infested squints,
i want them all. these FOBs, these twinkies, these robots, these mamasans,
these dinks, these ping-pangs, these dogeaters,
these chonky changers. these banana-bread illiterate
             job-stealing diseased fobby accented fools.
these emotionless subservient tings & tongs with sideways cooters.
these viruses, bred for extinction. these chinamen. these automatons.
these squinty waifus, these fortune cookies, these slits,

these celestials--an old word i learned that means grotesque, an alien figure, an
outsider from the place we are from.

i’ll park my box & throw a good bash. remember that

every word they have for us drew us closer to the stars,
     a body cultivated in the heavens, a party

in the sky

Nancy Huang grew up in America and China. She is a VONA, Tin House, Watering Hole, and Pink Door fellow. She’s received an Andrew Julius Gutow Academy of American Poets Prize, a James F. Parker Poetry Award, a Michigan Young Playwright Award, and others. Her debut poetry collection, Favorite Daughter (Write Bloody Publishing), is out of print. She has a poetry MFA from NYU.