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Cherry Moon: Emerging Voices from the Asian Diaspora
CHERRY MOON is a special print anthology issue of Gasher Journal exclusively featuring the voices of Asian diaspora emerging writers. Contributors Rhony Bhopla, Drew Chen, Wai Julia Cheung, Sher Ting Chim, Emily Dial, Kyla-Yen Giffin, Fiona Jin, Verna Zafra-Kasala, Mylo Lam, Cristina Legarda, June Lin, Willie Lin, Daniel Liu, Lydia Liu, Michelle Masood, Andy Parker, Maria Picone , Kimberly Ramos, Lis Chi Siegel, Grace Q. Song, Susan Sugai, Katie Tian, Salonee Verma , Sharon Zhang, Winniebell Xinyu Zong, Akemi, Jaqueline Xiong, Maria Picone , Amy Wang , Krapook Yanitta, Alyvia Luong, Mei Lam So, Saahil M., and more... "An exceptional covey of writers using language and thought to plumb questions of relationship to Asia as well as the non-Asian spaces they live in. The fact of this rigorous anthology, arranged with care and deliberate attention, shows me more new poets and writers to read again and again and trust that there are presses out there with representational justice helming the literary world. Think of how many constellations are out there beyond the Cherry Moon. Think of CHERRY MOON opening the pages of possibility."--Rajiv Mohabir Poetry. Fiction. Essay. Hybrid. Literary Criticism. Art. Asian & Asian American Studies. LGBTQ+ Studies. Magazine.
174 pages, Paperback
Published May 1, 2023
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June 8, 2024Here's another story I contributed to a lil anthology overseas. I wrote it after a sexual assault, but could never finish it. As the story progressed, the world became increasingly fragmentary and desolate, like The Book of Monelle shot through An Inhabitant of Carcosa, or Anna Kavan's Ice. Characters buried themselves in piles of hay, laughing as they repeated the same actions; ghosts slipped through deserted streets like the remnants of a hurricane; empty boxes replicated in an apartment shift that never seemed to end. It was this assault that led me to psychotherapy and trauma studies—fields that taught me my dehumanisation had begun much earlier than I'd known.
—
Trauma is a Death You Cannot Die
“Just a little further,” you say.
You take us through the park. A gentle whine follows from the highway. A distancing that grows with each step. It’s a warm, empty feeling, like the body of death.
I follow the prints of your feet, the contours of your wake.
I thought and thought and thought, but nothing changed. The sky tipped. I couldn’t keep in time with it. The whine grew a drill to the back of my head.
“It’s dark,” I say.
“Just a little further,” you repeat. You reach your arm out, as if to brush something aside, but there is nothing ahead — less than nothing.
There are fields and fields of transmission towers. They reach their arms out and gleam unbroken a communion of static.
You used to lie beneath them in the tall Summer grass and lose yourself for hours.
The birds don’t come any more. They flocked once, in black and blues and canary reds, but the sky tipped.
Your body a hum of lust exalts creation and the child cries and breaks out in sobs and you would like a love that affirms you in your loneliness and eats its way into your fragrant sweet heart like the day your mother left and you felt the first pangs of unbearable loss.
The birds once came so easily, but you don’t even notice — you’re not even here.
You climbed out the window that night. You dropped away before a darkening sky and I laughed and laughed and loved, drawn to the trembling of your listless apathy.
“We could walk for hours and get nowhere,” you said, midnight blue slurpee before somnambulant eyes. “We could start and never end.”
“We already have,” I replied.
There are empty lots. There is tar and wild grass, soda cans and unchanging white light. You looked pale before it all, before a topology of muted trauma.
With a lazy smile, you turned to me and said “Do you think that, if I died, I would repeat endlessly across space and time?”
The concrete sweats a free and wild creation sometimes you lie beneath it all and cry until your stomach aches at terminal 43A a mute passes you a diagram of hand signals but you are already on the train city receding under your skin like nettles gripped in passing already gone.
You had to get out a body jejune and the man at the airport offered you cash so you went to the hotel twenty and posed bare teeth blocking the sun on the floor clothes like limp children he pocketed each and every after you.
There was soil under your nails and the smell of acetate and you slept in a black mould apartment for three hundred days until your lungs broke.
And time fell apart like a vertical labyrinth.
—
the nightmare is adjusting;
do you remember three times three times three?
it was golden lights beneath a midnight harbour
and sweat and rain and
trauma undoing all you loved.
—
Trauma is a Death You Cannot Die
“Just a little further,” you say.
You take us through the park. A gentle whine follows from the highway. A distancing that grows with each step. It’s a warm, empty feeling, like the body of death.
I follow the prints of your feet, the contours of your wake.
I thought and thought and thought, but nothing changed. The sky tipped. I couldn’t keep in time with it. The whine grew a drill to the back of my head.
“It’s dark,” I say.
“Just a little further,” you repeat. You reach your arm out, as if to brush something aside, but there is nothing ahead — less than nothing.
There are fields and fields of transmission towers. They reach their arms out and gleam unbroken a communion of static.
You used to lie beneath them in the tall Summer grass and lose yourself for hours.
The birds don’t come any more. They flocked once, in black and blues and canary reds, but the sky tipped.
Your body a hum of lust exalts creation and the child cries and breaks out in sobs and you would like a love that affirms you in your loneliness and eats its way into your fragrant sweet heart like the day your mother left and you felt the first pangs of unbearable loss.
The birds once came so easily, but you don’t even notice — you’re not even here.
You climbed out the window that night. You dropped away before a darkening sky and I laughed and laughed and loved, drawn to the trembling of your listless apathy.
“We could walk for hours and get nowhere,” you said, midnight blue slurpee before somnambulant eyes. “We could start and never end.”
“We already have,” I replied.
There are empty lots. There is tar and wild grass, soda cans and unchanging white light. You looked pale before it all, before a topology of muted trauma.
With a lazy smile, you turned to me and said “Do you think that, if I died, I would repeat endlessly across space and time?”
The concrete sweats a free and wild creation sometimes you lie beneath it all and cry until your stomach aches at terminal 43A a mute passes you a diagram of hand signals but you are already on the train city receding under your skin like nettles gripped in passing already gone.
You had to get out a body jejune and the man at the airport offered you cash so you went to the hotel twenty and posed bare teeth blocking the sun on the floor clothes like limp children he pocketed each and every after you.
There was soil under your nails and the smell of acetate and you slept in a black mould apartment for three hundred days until your lungs broke.
And time fell apart like a vertical labyrinth.
—
the nightmare is adjusting;
do you remember three times three times three?
it was golden lights beneath a midnight harbour
and sweat and rain and
trauma undoing all you loved.
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