{"id":1692,"date":"2019-04-03T23:06:03","date_gmt":"2019-04-03T23:06:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/160-the-words\/?page_id=1692"},"modified":"2024-08-06T19:26:03","modified_gmt":"2024-08-06T19:26:03","slug":"wordplay","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/the-words-april-2019\/wordplay\/","title":{"rendered":"Wordplay"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sophie Hilker \u201920<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"Albert<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

This month, The Words<\/em> is so grateful and excited to showcase the work of English minor Albert Lee ’20. Catfished from Honolulu, Hawai’i with a financial aid package, Albert Lee is a junior at <\/span>Macalester College. An <\/span>Asian s<\/span>tudies major and creative writing minor, his writing is inspired by larger questions about postmemory, diasporic intimacy, and Asian-futurism. Essentially, ‘How beautiful does the world need to be before I stop wanting to leave it?’ Currently, he is reading Ocean Vuong’s intensely fragile novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous<\/i>. He hopes he can one day connect to the pathos within the human condition as Ocean does so tenderly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Please enjoy Albert’s poetry!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

\u5f1f\u5f1f<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. <\/strong>I met a boy who, at the age of 14, had the same haircut I did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. <\/strong>\u201cHunger is to give the body what it knows it cannot keep.\u201d \u2014 Ocean Vuong<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. <\/strong>My mouth had coffee with him, and as soon as my legs got home, my lungs forgot how to breathebreathebreathebreathebreathebreathebreathebreathebreathebreathebreathe b r e a t h e<\/p>\n\n\n\n

4. <\/strong>My hair either looks like an expired Christmas tree or an angry porcupine dipped in wax.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

5<\/b>. hehasanxietyhehasanxietyhehasanxietyhehasanxietyhehasanxietyhehasanxietyhehasanxietytoo<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

6. <\/strong>He tames his porcupine every morning with heavy-duty hair paste; I gave up after the second week of freshman year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

7. <\/strong>His belly is empty but I will not gavage him five-thousand years of regurgitated daddy issues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

8. <\/strong>We both used to be fatter than the Asian oompa-loompas and we\u2019re still browner than the chocolate factory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

9. <\/strong>I don\u2019t know how long I can keep promising to take care of him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

10. <\/strong>I went through his old Facebook photos and found pictures of myself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

11. <\/strong>I starve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

12. <\/strong>Fuck You And Your Fucking Problematic Chocolate Factory Full Of Chinky Brown Boys Who Bleed Like Him, Willy Wonkass.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

13. <\/strong>He has a pretty, Chinese, and pretty Chinese girlfriend named Francesca.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

14. <\/strong>I hope Fran knows how to love him before his anxiety knows how to kill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

of koi\u3068 ai\u3068 sakura\u3068 silence\u3068 war\u3068 warmth\u3068 love\u3068 loss\u3068 hashi\u3068<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n

m<\/b> Maybe it\u2019s na\u00efve for me to expect the world to scream
<\/span>a<\/b> and shoot just because another human is shot.
<\/span>s<\/b> Silence is not the absence of a gunshot.
<\/span>s<\/b> Silence is the presence of a bulletstorm. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

s<\/b> Sometimes, I set my hashi ablaze
<\/span>h<\/b> hoping someone cares,
<\/span>o<\/b> or at least, stays warm,
<\/span>o<\/b> or at least, stays.
<\/span>t<\/b> To be fair, I don\u2019t usually set my hashi ablaze;
<\/span>i <\/b>I prefer to let it rot. When sakura blossoms in the midst of war,
<\/span>n<\/b> nobody can explain the difference between koi and ai. I
<\/span>g<\/b> guess koi is to live for love, whereas ai is to die for it? <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

s<\/b> Shootings are koi. They either mature into ai or silence.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

[originally published in the September Issue of <\/span>The Write Launch<\/span><\/i>]<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

\u6211\u662f\u522b\u7684\u4e8b\u7269 \u300a\u84dd\u84dd\u300b <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u6211\u662f\u6211\u7684\u82b1\u6735\u7684\u679c\u5b9e\u3002
<\/span>\u6211\u662f\u6211\u7684\u6625\u590f\u540e\u7684\u971c\u96ea\u3002
<\/span>\u6211\u662f\u8870\u8001\u7684\u5987\u4eba\u548c\u5979\u6614\u65e5\u9752\u6625
<\/span>                 \u5168\u90e8\u7684\u7f8e\u4e3d\u3002 <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u6211\u662f\u522b\u7684\u4e8b\u7269
<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u6211\u662f\u6211\u66fe\u8bfb\u8fc7\u7684\u4e66
<\/span>\u9760\u8fc7\u7684\u5899\u58c1     \u7b14\u548c\u68b3\u5b50\u3002
\u662f\u6bcd\u4eb2\u7684\u4e73\u623f\u548c\u5a74\u513f\u7684\u5c0f\u5634
\u662f\u4e00\u573a\u98ce\u66b4\u540e\u8150\u70c2\u7684\u6811\u53f6
<\/span>\u2014\u2014\u2014 \u9ed1\u8272\u7684\u6ce5\u571f <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I Am Another Thing<\/b> by Lan Lan (Translated by Albert Lee)<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am the fruits of my flower.
<\/span>I am the frost and snow after my spring and summer.
<\/span>I am the waning woman and her once unmarried youth
<\/span>                  in all of its beauty. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am another thing
<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am the books I once read
<\/span>the walls I once leaned on<\/span> the pens      and the combs.
<\/span>am the mother\u2019s breast and the baby\u2019s small mouth
<\/span>am the leaves decomposing after the storm
<\/span>\u2014\u2014\u2014 black earth<\/span><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sophie Hilker \u201920 This month, The Words is so grateful and excited to showcase the work of English minor Albert Lee ’20. Catfished from Honolulu, Hawai’i with a financial aid package, Albert Lee is a junior at Macalester College. An Asian studies major and creative writing minor, his writing is inspired by larger questions about postmemory, diasporic […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":913,"featured_media":0,"parent":1690,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1692","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/913"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1692"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1692\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7715,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1692\/revisions\/7715"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/the-words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}