Writing
Published Work: Short Stories, Poetry, and Ephemera
Exceprts from published pieces. I started submitting my work in 2016, around the time I started to feel regret for dropping of grad school the first time.
Poem: “Cities In Dust”
“In this perfect howl of emptiness I conjure you
from blankets and linens and sheets of paisley,
your name perched gingerly on the tip of my tongue
seeking the words to describe your
alabaster body
hair of sandstone
navel lit aglow
and the looking-glass pool
where your ear meets your neck”
Poem: “The Good Kind”
“I ain’t the good kind of Asian. I’m the one
who disappoints you. I see it in your eyes
when we go out for sushi and I forget what nigiri is.
I feel it across your tattoos I’ll kiss someday:
koi fish samurai and fisherman’s wives
wide-eyed cats with claws outstretched
characters faded indecipherable, strewn like wreckage”
Poem: “Letter From the Ikea in Red Hook, Brooklyn”
“I was
imagining the future
I can never have
wandering ghostlike through
other people’s homes. An accumulation
of lives hypothetical—”
Poem: “LAMENT FOR THE YUBA COUNTY 5”
“you
roll the windows down
emerge from steel cocoons
leave mercury behind
you
in disdainful terrain
seeking polaris
but they all point north”
Short Story: “Year of the Rabbit”
“This was once a true story. I was standing at the corner of Hamilton and Emerson, watching the cars pass through the streetlights, and it was overcast but warm, rare for the season, when I encountered the man who had come from France. I had watched him leave the boutique hotel behind me, seen his face scanning the intersection, taking it all in. Performing his calculations, distant and cold. Our eyes met.”
Short Story: “CHINATOWN, SUMMER, 1984”
“Michael. That was a good name: Michael. Just two syllables, each announced by short and sharp points, blending with a point like a clearing of the throat, and he rolled it around with his tongue like a piece of hard candy, stretching out his thin lips trying to get the pronunciation right: Michael. Michael. Fourteen and a half hours ago he had heard the pilot say it out loud, over the loudspeaker: errrr, uh, folks: welcome aboard Northwest Orient flight 18 bound for New York, this is your captain, Captain Michael ______ speaking, I’m joined here by First Officer B-, and though he didn’t understand most of it, he knew that it contained a name, and he believed it to be a good name. Worthy of respect.”
Poem: “Lament for the Killer of Camile Jenatzy”
“How was I to know this was all
an elaborate joke, this weak and weary life,
grasping at morsels,
grasping at anything
that called from the bushes, laid neatly
within my sights: this fortune from God”
SLANT: A Journal of Poetry, Issue 35
Flash Fiction: “One Thousand Free Hours”
“it’s 2002. you walk home from the bus stop with Jon Bach, who is your neighbor, and Andrew
Mueller, who you still think is your best friend. they are juniors, three years older than you, and
therefore they are kings. from his L.L. Bean backpack Jon pulls out a picture of a naked woman
and waves it in front of your face. she is grainy and spread-eagled atop a shaggy carpet in a red-
tinted room. it’s the first time you see bush. they laugh their asses off.”
Short Story: “CATS AS CLASSIC NEW ENGLAND DIRTBAGS”
“In the summer he takes him to the creek to show him a dead body. They follow the leaning fences through the mud and the leeches and the pesky poisoned rhododendron; they balance on fallen moss-covered logs one paw before the other, feeling a thrill akin to Indiana Jones across the low and muddy water, stagnant between the greyish brown rocks. Moose picks a leech from his front paw with his teeth. Marshmallow bats at a yellowing fern and the ladybug dangling from a single spiral. He eats the ladybug with a flick of his sandpapery tongue.”
Flash Fiction: “Sailing Lessons”
Somehow, I found myself yearning to remember. At the harbor the clouds were pale and heavy, and the wind came in from the south-southwest: here I had once docked a 22-meter Skerry yacht named the Wind Waker, a name bestowed by my then-wife, both having disappeared below the waves of my memories. Some boy approached. His nametag said Jacob and he had brown wavy hair which once resembled my own, and he wore a poorly-fitted polo shirt embroidered with the logo of the sailing club. I inquired as to a private lesson, you know, just a refresher, and he looked down at his cheap watch and said without looking up: yeah, sure, I can squeeze you in. I found his insouciance typical of his generation and therefore grating. We rigged a 14-foot Laser and set off.
Feature: Poet of the Week, Blake Z. Rong
Share with us a defining Brooklyn experience, good, bad, or in between.
It would likely be last weekend, when a friend I met through cat enthusiasm—who is a food writer and editor—held a rooftop hang a few blocks from me. We shucked oysters, drank wine, and discovered why rich people pay way too much money for caviar, because it’s actually good. A lot of mutual friends were there, many whom I hadn’t seen since before the pandemic, and many with whom I’d gotten close since it began, and some of them were just meeting each other for the first time: the idea that I’ve made many close friends in Brooklyn from just trading cat pictures underscores how strong the bonds can be in the writing community, and how a common thing can lead to so many human experiences and interactions. Also, all of our cats are cute as hell.
Poem: THERE WILL BE A SONG FOR WHEN THEY FIND YOUR BODY
you were incandescent,
a flame-kissed tear in a
Sierra Nevada wind
forty degrees Fahrenheit
and dropping.
atop nine hundred ninety-eight
cubic centimeters
of raw whining power
POEM: DEATH FOR DRUG TRAFFICKERS UNDER SINGAPORE LAW
Please, pat me down again. Brush the back
of your hand upward until you
feel resistance.
Did a stranger pack your bags? Did a man or woman
ask you to carry something for them?
A piece of their absence?
A small good thing?
A little kiss?
POEM: Song for Neo-Tokyo in the Year of its Destruction
Have you got color in your cheeks?
Do you hear the silence on the other end?
You discover that you are made of flowers.
At a press conference King Ghidorah apologizes for the
rampage,
bowing his three heads before the podium.
Short Story: This Will Haunt You
Sunday morning, light rain, and clouds, and I was standing before the kitchen window, staring at the Canada geese beating their wings against the blank grey sky, when I got the call about you. Poured myself another cup of coffee. My wife was sitting at the kitchen table, and she saw me with her typical calm unblinking grace, as if asking silently through her hazelnut eyes—I knew that she meant well, but she could never understand. This I knew for sure. I slipped into the study, closed the door behind me. Considered locking it but there was no need. When the call was done I played a sad song on the record player, a song that made me feel like the last man in the world, a voyeur, an unwanted witness to your pain, and in some way I figured that if I played it loud enough I could make you hear it for yourself.
An Introduction to Blake Z. Rong by Tiffany Troy
Blake Z. Rong represents a fresh new voice that immediately grabs your attention, and keeps it. The speaker in the poems by Rong is lost amidst Van Gogh’s paintings, the Manhattan skyline, and across crumpled bedsheets. In each, he “long[s] for words that will prove [him] wrong.” I love how the words being searched for aren’t facts but a music that in its “shattering” “makes a beautiful sound.” His inimitable voice is carried through with his wit and keen insight into the geographies to which he travels, geographies which are wrapped in the season of wanting, and desire, perhaps, that something might in fact change.
Jesus Built My Hot Rod
After three nights in jail I was back on the streets again and staring down the length of Francisquito Avenue, watching the heat rise from the hood of my car, feeling the vibrations under the seat well upward from the recesses of the earth. I was wandering not the desert but the boulevards of the foothills, somewhere in Chino, or Rosemond, or La Habra, then to the outskirts of West Covina, Diamond Bar to Irwindale, Cerritos to Buena Park, where I dropped down the 39 towards Anaheim. Invisible boundaries that meant nothing, yet claimed so much. How this land divides and conquers.
I took my rosary beads off the rearview mirror and held them to my pistol-grip shifter, waiting for the signal to drop.
Sunny Sixteen
I learned all of my roommates' schedules. On Tuesdays, Alphonse worked nights: I could smell him before I heard his voice, reeking of animal grease. Some nights he brought me a sack of leftover cheeseburgers, and we'd sit on my couch and dive in like kings. Every other Friday Alphonse's girlfriend Sophie visited. They would whisper softly outside the door before entering, and her head would be tucked in his shoulder as they entered. She always held a polite smile toward me, yet her eyes betrayed her, like those of a cat staring at a bird on its windowsill. On Fridays Isabella could almost beat the traffic home: 110 to the 105, PCH to Aviation, then Avenue H to the Esplanade. If she took Artesia instead she could shave off five minutes—but the thing was, it felt faster, and when you had no other options, that mattered the most. On Thursdays Salazar took improv classes, and at the two-drink minimum shows he lured us to under the pretense of friendship, we were jarred by a charisma we never saw at home. Him, the star of the show! It was too much to fathom. I guess you had to know him. Lastly, Nick had been a friend from college, a fellow photographer who also had too many photos of sunsets in his portfolio, but he actually got paid for them. "What's the point of living here," he proclaimed one night over habanero margs, "if you can't see the ocean from your house? Why put up with this bullshit—" he swung an arm around the kitchen, knocking a trio of beer glasses into the sink, and breaking two—"if you can't even get the thing everyone comes here for?"