Pledging Allegiance to Taste – Tiffany Troy Conversation & Five Poems

for the series, The American Wing
curated by Carlie Hoffman and Tiffany Troy

Carlie Hoffman: Your poems map a cartography of New York City, especially Queens, with remarkable attention to infrastructure, people, businesses, and color. At the same time, introspection and philosophy sustain the poems’ metaphysical world, almost like a kind of glue. What was your writing process like? In some ways, the poems feel stream-of-consciousness, but they also have shape and a clear revision process.

Tiffany Troy: I often joke that writing is my “very serious hobby” and I enjoy writing the way I enjoy cracking a joke (at the illustration of the Diablos Burritos in Wilmington, at the diva, Brother God Nerve, and what have you). But beyond the humor, I write poems the way my dad might tell me to “get a dog.” Writing is my means to make sense of the world and connect to it, with often very deep feelings that I bottled up, either because they don’t matter, or because I must mask those feelings with a more palatable presentation. In that way, I treat poetry so seriously because it is a dialogue with my soul. My soul, though, is not exactly a form, is it? It’s probably one fifth milk tea, one fourth fries, one hundredth Oreo McFlurry. What I mean to say is that Flushing’s bakery workers, the clean roads in Flushing after the summer rain, and the wonder of the sky (overlooking the concrete parking lot, a microcosm of the concrete jungle that is New York) have often spurred within me a strong pathos, and I write sometimes in the moment, or after, but always chasing after that feeling. That buoyancy is a quality that I associate with New York, and particularly in Queens, a confluence of linguistic and cultural diversity. In that sense, revision to me seeks to bring to the fore those emotions (like the likely watching Everything Everywhere All At Once at double speed) and what that tells us about the speaker and her preoccupations. The stream-of-consciousness can be a bit deceptive in that the associations are there for a purpose, and serve to illuminate the speaker’s desire to reach toward a deeper truth or maybe a gesture towards moral clarity, even though the speaker often fails to even press pause on the Garg Family podcast or continues to voyeuristically exercise by scrolling through Alyssa Liu skating on ice.

CH: Your poems often feature titled characters. Where did that impulse come from?

TT: Is it perhaps blasphemous to call Master my muse? But if Dante can have Beatrice, and King Lear has his Cordelia, perhaps it’s not so far-fetched after all. In my first poetry book, Dominus, all but one character is named (as in by their Title: Friend, Nurse, Master, Brother God Nerve). The speaker, of course, is unnamed, but defines herself by her station in relation to the characters: friend to Friend, disciple to Master, daughter to Mama, and sister to Brother God Nerve, etc. The impulse comes from (I think) the same impulse that poets might have, in reaching towards myths: where the characters’ ability to fit in (or not) within the archetype that they are given propels the narrative in lyric form. The speaker is constantly struggling with the dictates of power (next to her powerlessness), and that is much easier for me to reach towards (speaking as the poet now) in personas of the speaker wherein the speaker can be fixed in different points in time.

The more honest answer, though, is that each poet has their degree of aversion towards the shining upon the vulnerable self, and so the characters (as in a short story or novel) become refractions of the self rather than a reflection of it. In that way I am less stuck on the degree to which a character adheres to the person or people upon which the characters are based, and more interested in the dynamics between what is said and left unsaid.

CH: I’m struck by how often your lines capture the way grief lives inside daily life, while also making room for beauty. For example: “All I have are virtual images of her paintings that I cannot afford to buy.” Do you think that tension is essential to poetry? Do you think it’s particularly American, or does it travel across time and place?

TT: The Met Museum had an exhibition on Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty, which the curator structured through two lines: the “serpentine” line, signifying Lagerfeld’s historicist, romantic and decorative impulses, and the “straight” line, representing his modernist, classicist, and minimalist tendencies. Just as that pendulum swing between the classical and the baroque (and their coexistence) shaped Lagerfeld’s conception of beauty, in some ways the most devastating truths (like the death of the artist, Y in the poem) are tempered with a desire to consume her by purchasing her painting (to remember her). Poetry meditates on that desire, and mediates between the speaker’s conflicted feelings about wanting to retain a piece of Y, while also acknowledging the limits of her ability to see the watercolor architecture of Y or remember that beauty of Y’s kindness at Central Park during the summer despite the black sun of sorrow.

In some ways, the American Dream can be reframed as a journey towards beauty. Over time, that journey has become rechanneled towards homeownership or wealth maximization wherein the creative impulses of the artist are transformed into the Schumpeterian wave of creative destruction. We are obsessed with the newer, better thing, or as Ronny Chieng said, we are so done with Amazon Prime that we want Amazon Before. The American poet (can) show us how to slow down, and see (to borrow the poet Andrew Grace’s words) that there is beauty in the acre in which we live, if only we look deeply. That deep look (“she looks at me in the face and into my eyes”) is not so different from the appreciation of Renaissance art. Instead it restores the meaning of the “face” as the essence of the self rather than a body count.

CH: How did you begin writing poetry?

TT: My villain origin story began with an “Ode to Fear” which I dubbed from Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” to make fun of a middle school Spanish teacher. (“Kudos to you,” wrote a classmate in my yearbook.) Then baby villain became junior villain when I threw one of my family members in one of Dante’s circles of hell that I created, for Emily Moore’s European Literature class, and I got a Pikachu stamp. I wanted to major in Visual Arts and Art History in college, but I was not particularly astute with my hands, and so instead of carving into wood in my Woodcut class, I accidentally cut into my thumb. While nursing my poor thumb with the thumb sock that I got from the school nurse, my dad and I decided, after I enrolled in this class called “The Crisis of the ‘I’,” which had the right amount of emo for a college sophomore, that perhaps writing would be the way to go. We were both very much aligned in our love of the blank space. All jokes aside, I began writing poetry because I was the happiest when I wrote poems, and in poetry I felt the most alive.

CH: Technology appears throughout the poems, including Google Maps and iPhones. As American poetry evolves, do you think more technology will enter the poetic landscape? Can technology itself hold beauty and truth?

TT: What the poet writes with or on to me in some way shapes the “default” setting, if you will, of the poetic form and constraint of the poet. The most obvious example might be typing poems on our phones: by default, the poetic line becomes delimited by the width of a phone. I welcome more technology into the landscape as a reflection of modern life, with its fallibility (the Chase Convention Center being mapped to a swamp; the rage-baiting of podcasts and reels for likes), etc. Sometimes it can feel like the academy-supported lyric poetry has little in common with the realities of the world. Our poetic vision is going to be shaped by the media that we absorb and the values that are ingrained in us through childhood, and the inclusion of technology is an acknowledgment that the ephemeral (coming and going of trends, as in fashion) is what makes us human. If the maiming of the Industrial Revolution leads us to the horror of the body being literally destroyed by machines, the maiming of the mind in the age of AI is not its use as tools but its displacement of critical thought. My critique of AI is that it doesn’t share the same intelligence or heart as a human: it may mimic emotions (like a Robo car emoting a heart), but it is empty inside. We cannot outsource our morals to crowdthink.

CH: Which American poets do you wish more people read?

TT: Voice is tied to form, diction, and mannerisms, and I would argue the best way to develop your own voice is to seriously study the work of other poets. In that sense the American poets who have shaped me all have singular voices: Larry Levis (“The Widening Spell of Leaves” taught me how to write an epic poem in describing that stillness of the collective inaction next to xenophobia and hate), Frank Bidart (his poems push the possibility of the voice, when the voice breaks into outburst from external or internal pressures), Myung Mi Kim (Penury or Under Flag has a polyvocality wherein words become the map of memory that the self re-enacts in multiple orders), Andrew Grace (his “close seeing” in Sancta and A Brief History of the Midwest  shaped me to better appreciate my community even as others denigrate it), Esteban Rodriguez (captures so well the ambivalence and heaviness of the immigrant child and intergenerational dynamics), Tiana Clark (has a tight control over her voice-driven poems about Tara Walker and about desire others deride as “too much” that she transforms into a superpower), and Aviya Kushner (her conception of rage not as in contrast but as a result for a desire for justice has shaped my writing ever since I encountered Wolf Lamb  Bomb.)

CH: Can you talk a bit about your translation work? You translate Chinese and Spanish poetry. Why these languages, and how has translation shaped your own poems?

TT: You may have noticed that I code-switch quite sharply depending on who I’m talking to. In general, my poems are also more interested in meaning over sound. In my daily life, I spend much of my day going back and forth among languages, and there, clarity in intention and in meaning takes precedence over diction. Chinese is the language of my homeland, Taiwan, together with Taiwanese. Chinese is the language of instruction, so though I attended an international school, I learned Chinese and French (which progressed to the level of comme ci, comme ça). Like many children my age, I learned the piano and also learned Japanese. Each summer (and later each weekend) my brother and I would practice by copying the textbook (writing out the Chinese characters), and I would read the Taiwanese canon that is in turn shaped by the canon of Chinese literature. That came in handy as I worked primarily for immigrant workers many of whom spoke Chinese. Spanish was the language available in middle school, and I continued on the trajectory in high school when the Office where I worked started to have its own Spanish-speaking clientele. I remember seeing the ID of one of my clients and realizing he was around my age: I figured I must be brave for them. I must do better. My deep dive into Spanish (and Hispanophone literature and culture) had to do with my desire to better understand my clients and the forces that made them who they are. So in some senses, the literary translation is secondary, as a way for me to pay homage to these incredible poets from different parts of the world (Venezuela, Chile, Peru), who like me, are shaped by the sociocultural forces of my country but also of their idiosyncrasies (vibing about nature and ecological disasters in lines stretching the page; to Joan Mitchell and focusing on the redness of the ruby that is blood in complex relationships; and in the metaphysical possibilities of familial history). 

Translation has expanded my outlook towards eco-poetics as an urban millennial poet and the visceral nature of longing. Much as my stint as an environmental law intern taught me about how systems of power go hand in hand with displacement (in our trash, and the history of the Dead Horse Bay as a mass waste cleanup site), reading and translating Santiago Acosta has helped me connect the dots between the individual (with a plastic cup sucking a plastic or paper straw) and where waste lands (a literal wasteland) and how that might be connected to the quelling of student protests and be part of this global landscape. I admire that seeking of the self and this vision as a poet who writes a lot more from the vantage point of what a speaker can see (not far). With translation, I am a lot more attuned to my place in the world, as I incorporate the body (and its limitations: drinking, gagging, swallowing, etc.) in my work as a critique of the speaker and the world she dwells in.

You may have also noticed that the first poem sounds and feels very different from the other four poems. It’s an English translation (by yours sincerely) of a poem I wrote in Chinese in a workshop with Liao Wei-tang through Accent Sisters. As a Taiwanese-American in diaspora, there were neologisms and fusions of cultures through transliteration and translation (in other words, something new not found in either language). I found that just like Accent Sisters advertise accent as a Superpower, that defamiliarization in writing in a language I did not usually write creatively in allowed me to write about the trauma of having witnessed the facade of someone I thought of as infallible begin to crack and crumble without being heavy-handed. It begins with a need to speak in English, and continues with the speaker being spammed and told off before ending with pressing pause on a family podcast that the speaker listens to a bit too fervently in her attempt to find family (or perhaps friends) in her solitude as a bespoke mediator between languages and generations with very different values.

CH: What draws you to the prose poem? Is the process different from writing lineated poems?

TT: Aime Cesaire writes, in Return of the Native Land, that “you could say that I became a poet by renouncing poetry. Do you see what I mean? Poetry was for me the only way to break the stranglehold that accepted French [poetic] form held on me.” Cesaire, writing in French, is thinking through and about the possibilities of language that exist outside of the constraints of traditional poetic forms that reinforce a pattern of thought. It diverges from his experience of the world, where perhaps there is no “hero,” or protagonist in the epic tradition or a ballad, but a polyphony of voices.

Prose poetry, as a poetic form/ prose form, allows some space to breathe while maintaining the poetic form’s emphasis on image/ feeling as opposed to plot/ argument. In this sense, writing poems is very different from writing a call script to a legislator or an op-ed. The goal isn’t to persuade but to allow one to share resonances with another, and oftentimes the audience is that of the self. Poetry then becomes a means to have a dialogue with the self, a bit like in the Iliad when Achilles speaks to Patroclus like an extension of himself.

For me, after writing Dominus, there was some time when I wrote only in prose poems as I spiraled into an identity crisis as an artist. If the lyric poem is a Victorian garden with the expected surprise found in language, beautiful diction, and the like, then the prose poem is a bit like a meadow where I am free to dream and criss-cross between reality and the space of memory without being stopped by silence. (In some ways, I suppose, it’s the mind’s reaction to the bite-sizeness and the commodification of poetry to present in a certain manner.) Silence is good, of course, like in “The Lagoon,” the speaker embarks on this slow walk to heaven. The andante of “The Lagoon” contrasts with that quality of overwhelm of sensations, information, and feeling of the prose poems “Anti-Pollyanna,” “Rain upon polyurethane,” and “I miss you too.” That expansiveness allows the self to find its name, years after being harassed, the passing of a long one, and playing the role of a character (a “Movant” or customer rather than a person).

CH: What do you hope for the future of American poetry?

TT: As a poet-critic reflecting upon my journey thus far, I feel myself most drawn to that section of American poetics that is decidedly one-of-a-kind, in large part because it includes children of immigrants mouthing a foreign tongue, their mother tongue (foreignness and motherland being fraught words that confound them), in thinking about mixed race identity in relation to theater and performance, mixed with archival materials of declassified materials of war as a visual form. 

I ask myself: What does it mean to be “diasporic,” as opposed to rooted in the American homeland? What does it mean to construct a “home” through language? What, after all, can language do for us when we are the subject and object being described in classified documents, the body counts in memorials, and what can blowing up the lyric form do for poets and their readers? 

My hope for American poetry is that it continues to drive at those questions (or create new questions). To be co-curator with you is to co-create something in collaboration that neither of us could create alone: the confluence of visions by kindred spirits aiming to highlight who we consider to be the most important poets writing today. 

For me, the question – and why the interview title is so apt – is: what are we pledging allegiance to? What about the Constitution that I have sworn to uphold? What is the rule of law that I believe in? What are the values that we are loyal to? How does that present itself in my work, which looks at it through the lens of a speaker very much swept up by the rhetoric which prioritizes efficiency as a means to her ideal of the good?

Aren’t we all a nesting doll, falling and standing back up, hurting and healing, as we make our home in a new world? To me, part of the beauty of The American Wing is that it is a statement that collectively we say no to those who seek to co-opt the democratic values of freedom of expression and thought; while also acknowledging the expansion of rights by civil rights activists who made it possible for me to be in a room, or sit at the table. It is all fine and good if you’re into cathedrals and the well-manicured garden; but it should also be fine if you would like to pay homage to your home, with love and in squalor, to borrow Salinger’s title. That is the deeper meaning behind why I work very hard to sustain a poetry community with like-minded poets who treat poetry with a sincerity and seriousness that I share.

MASTER TELLS ME

Brother God-Nerve told Master and me:
“Yingwen, please.”
I told him: 
“So sorry, our mother tongue is Zhongwen.”
God-Nerve said:
“Stop lying, your mother tongue changes 
depending on what’s convenient to you!”,
his screech unpleasantly high pitched like that of a soprano
singing her aria at the Metropolitan Opera, 
the opera house which called me 
on a 212 number, hence why I had to pick up,
fearing that I had somehow gotten myself in deep trouble again.
He asked me when I could become a member.
I apologized to him:
“So sorry, right now Master and I,
it’s not a good time…”
From the good of his heart, he told me about 
the seven-day trial on the “Met on Demand” website.
Instead of cheering me up, I grew solemn.
I thought of the stent after stent 
built to support the arteries
in Master’s heart and his deep blue thighs.
How I bartered his pain for extensions,
shamelessly kowtowing, groveling
as they kicked me again and again.
“This isn’t about courtesy,” they said.
That sad trial is incomparable with the blue of my master’s pain.
That is something the foolish Italian ladies
who throw themselves at love but forget to inspect 
the ID cards of their lovers couldn’t fathom.
At the toilet I often gag, at the smell, at the sight of myself.
I wondered whether I would be content to live 
like an animal for the rest of my life.
That night on Instagram,
I watched Dancing with the Stars.
Though Disney canceled Jimmy Kimmel, 
I did not have my white people friend’s determination
to declare their support for the First Amendment 
by canceling their Hulu and Disney+
because firstly I did not have 
the Beautiful Country-time to watch TV,
and secondly, I don’t have a Hulu subscription.
Well, I lied. I signed up for one to watch
Everything Everywhere All at Once,
at double-speed (I think) as I worked the late night.
They asked me how it was and to be honest
It sucked so badly.
“Maybe it would’ve been different if you 
actually watched the movie” they said.
This is my legacy as an immigrant child.
My patriotism is my lack of TikTok.
My filial piety is my dunking meds. 
It is, during our master-disciple time
when he tells me to stop talking
to put down my best friend,
to press pause on the Zarna Garg’s 
Family Podcast,
to put a pause to the family chatter
that distract me from repeating as a mantra
“I’m about to die because I am so tired.”
even while his heart is bleeding.

ANTI-POLLYANNA

I woke up with a lump in my throat and the air was warm and my body burning; I swept the peeled off skin flakes and shreds of hair into the trash, turned off the alarm and stepped into the cool shower and took off the white T-shirt, which I laid on top of my pillowcase. 

I said, “Time to go,” before I headed down and ate one of two sausage McMuffins and sipped the milk tea Master made. I calibrated the top of the Benadryl cap till it matched the arrow pointing up at the bottom and twisted the purple cap open as well: down they go in two gulps. Then, I studied the duty of care and duty of loyalty and got distracted by emails and this near-unbearable itch when ten o’clock hit. I saw the tiny plane hung by invisible lines landing on and taking off from the miniature LaGuardia Airport.

Back at the office, I worked and time passed and then six o’clock hit. The TrainTime App and I rushed toward the bouquet of flowers and listened to the interviewer ask Novelist and she said that Gerard is the most interesting character, how gray he is–that Aristotle said the highest form of relationship is that of friendship and–that jealousy is wanting something someone has that you don’t have while envy is that plus the desire to take away what the person has away from them to keep it for yourself. 

I listened intently and remembered to smile and nod as the girl next to me asked Novelist an insipid question. Afterwards, I confided to Bookseller that I was in a class with Novelist where a Gerard told me that I did not have permission to speak. Instead, in giving me a C, he told me that I needed to observe how the model girls like Novelist talked and learn to speak without “likes” or “ums” and to make my mess of a mind decipherable in writing about Aristotle. I remembered how as I sat there, my tears betrayed me, and having received a tissue of pity, though not from who handed it to me. I forgot that I had butted heads with Gerard until the Novelist reminded me of the fact. She told me she admired me for speaking my mind, while she was a people pleaser and modeled her thoughts after his at a steamed bun restaurant where the waiter attended to her mostly and paid no attention to me.

When Bookseller asked if we ever suffered together, I answered, “No, I suffered alone,” with a knowing smile which deflected that what I felt back then was not envy as Gerard may have wanted me to feel, but a sense of indignation of being graded by a figurine like the author of the Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother who allegedly partied with Supreme Court justices and told her students to dress flirtatiously to get clerkships.

Today, I missed the roll call on my drive to the Queens Museum and smiled politely as they made fun of the LLM’s for their poor writing and lack of preparation. I thought then: not of how sometimes one simply could not redeem oneself, or unfly oneself from the country from which they came across time that thumps like a chokehold, but instead of myself attempting to pass, literally and metaphorically. 

In the end, what came to mind was me vomiting out the pages of essays I swallowed as I slowly drew unsweetened ice tea to my tongue and down my clogged throat, eight years after I missed class, as I sat alone across from Gerard in a dark room.

First published by Eunoia Review.

RAIN UPON POLYURETHANE

The color of rain is translucent. The color of the line is jet black, like Y’s hair tied up by a ponytail and her straight, trimmed bangs. The plastic dress is at once aesthetically formal and ridiculous, like an IKEA shower curtain gone wrong. We see meaning where we want to find them, so in the epsilon we see infinity, in the black circle the sun, and in the white plastic mannequin of a woman with gazelle legs and a chihuahua torso we find a man’s ideal of beauty. Not that of any man, but that of Karl Lagerfeld in his iconic black suit, white dress shirt, and white ponytail. We call the asymmetric design “primitive” but the better word for it is “instinctual,” because what it boils down to is a desire to harmonize the uniqueness of our existence. I once refused to write on handouts to keep the copy “clean.” The cloned macaques are failures because their telomeres are shortened with each copy. We dream of a clone that is exactly the same, a Ship of Theseus whose form will not be rendered quaint or obsolete like even the Doric pillars lining the academy and museum.

Outside, blue-collared men repaired the facade each summer. Inside the pillars is a collection of books, artifacts, and our interpretation of meaning. In it I take in the air-conditioned air and many people’s teachings and chidings. But still I do not know the color of grief; nor could I find it. It is six months and two days after Y’s passing and I cannot feel anything except being lost in my mind without the bright red-purple of the 7 train to hold me. Fashion like Lagerfeld’s A Line of Beauty comes into and out of mode, but unlike the pendulum swings between classicism and the flourishes of the rococo, Y will never come back to me. Instead, new images threaten to displace her in the RAM of the quotidian everyday. All I have are virtual images of her paintings that I cannot afford to buy. I see in those paintings her way of remembering the architecture of a home away from the home we have built here, in the city with stagnant air, as my student from Hong Kong calls it. My regret doesn’t change the fact that all her paintings have been sold out, or that I am not good enough to remember her without such aids.

Joe Hisashi’s “Summer” plays and in the exhibit, I see a man bawling on the floor next to a flag representing the razor-sharp guillotine. I prefer the stubbiness of the succulent leaves like floating amoebas to memories of colored water I can no longer subdue. Watercolor once brought me so much joy, as the colors danced and transformed into flowers, dreams away from the city that never sleeps, dreams that take root in cherubs and Central Park. But now, I brush water droplets off my urethane coat so that my cotton dress shirt will not be soaked with water. I must rub away the dark pencil marks of memory, for the black sun to no longer shine so brightly as to burn me. As my nails dig into the skin below the water, I wonder if I’ll stop myself before it stings.

First published by Querencia Summer 2023 literary anthology.

THE LAGOON

The infinite release in taking three of you green darlings
mean the hives all over my body,

the smell of bacteria interacting with air on top of dead skin,
can go away for a moment, and in that moment of no pain

I can replay again how I walked up that bridge next to Christina River,
up the stairs to the DuPont Environmental Education Center,

its wooden houses overwatching Nature.
And I was buoyed, walking briskly, thinking:

People must do things differently here!
Though I have no pretty words

to describe it, it has that vibe of the lengthy road to heaven:
the blue sky, the lush meadow with river from time to time,

flowers whose names are listed on the boards,
the weeds essential to the ecosystem: all good information to have

as I drummed up my courage to meet my death here
in the middle of nowhere with Dionne Brand in tow on my Tru RED iPhone,

after a full on breakfast of Hilton waffles before I discovered the whipped cream
and blueberries the next day, together with a bag of Lay’s and Oreo’s.

I smiled and snapped a picture of this meadow I’m heading into,
not of my childhood but of my present, of how calm I was,

heading into this air conditioned conference center,
until at the end of the Google map

the endpoint was a lake.
All my life I have chosen

this path
of least resistance,

and as I approach my 28th year,
I have desensitized

myself to all the ding-ding-dings,
much as I get my usual Sourdough Breakfast Sandwich,

pledging allegiance to the taste of this beautiful country
that often led me to face palm at the lagoon it led me to,

under the morning sun,
in lieu of a Convention Center.

I was too tired to panic, to be honest,
though I immediately turned back

calculating the time I need to retrace my steps,
but even then, underneath the fatigue

of my sweat-covered hands,
I recognized its blue,

absolutely gleaming, contained,
like after it’s been reset

by Decadron my
silk-smooth skin.

First published by Justice Reads, Narrative Justice Project.

I MISS YOU TOO

My ancestors are not in the annals of history, except perhaps in the margins and footnotes, just as today as the Movant on Calendar No. 32, I from time to time turn to the middle aged woman, the Clerk, who was sitting next to the judge with a name to nod, though I’m primarily making a case to the judge with a name. The judge’s face is what is in focus, her voice the melody to this aria, if you will, whereas the middle-aged clerk and the intern next to her are essential supporting forces without a name.

I have a name, I remind myself, much as I have a body that is often in transit, whether sitting in the cacophony of Queens Supreme Court with the gilded daisies panel which lift me from the lobby to the second or sixth floor, or nestled among suits where my Dell Inspiron warned me that the battery is running low, as I typed email after email of Dear Counselor or apologizing for this or that, or shopping on Amazon for a Duracell Power Bank, this time a substantial looking one I wouldn’t just buy and put aside, collecting dust, or at the office, as I ate Shun Won’s eggplant over rice or duck or chicken leg over rice or wonton soup, day after day, as I waste away.

“What is the relief you are seeking?” the judge had asked.

The other day a Security Guard at Bronx Supreme forgot to show up to his post on time and everyone’s check-in got delayed. “Wait till 9:45 a.m.” I pronounced, with the authority of having to come back for the third time due to three no shows. It was like that afternoon for that one day in the week of the Year of the Wooden Snake, Shun Won was closed for their staff party. I finally remember the name of the court attorney at Bronx Supreme. I know the name of the super but not the name of his assistants, even the one who friended me only to say that he liked my ass. 

A caller is without a name till it is added to the contacts and a person is without a name till their face, gait and stature are impressed upon my memory, memories prone to melancholy and misremembering. I often have reality’s crispness hit me like the face of the judge with a name and her clerk without one, the one super assistant who always said “mucho trabajo, poquito dinero”–to which I would say “mucho trabajo, poquito dinero” back–or the other super’s assistant who we thought died from Covid before he said hi to us a few years back. I desire to not just make do but make good of our anonymity as I grow carsick typing this on the bus filled with people. This included the young woman attorney I wanted to befriend, who backstabbed me by arguing I was on a train when I was in fact in Queens Supreme, attending conference after conference, the Dell Inspiron close to death without Wi-Fi even on the hotspot; the adults who looked as miserable as I was, and the old man with the cane who refused the seat so he can go up to the end of the two-segmented bus. 

I am heading again towards Shun Won to pick up lunch from the woman whose name I do not know and whose name she does not know. This is perhaps why when she says she misses me, she brings herself and me into focus as she looks at me in the face and into my eyes.

About the author:
Tiffany Troy is the author of Dominus (BlazeVOX [books]) and the chapbook When Ilium Burns (Bottlecap Press). She translated Catalina Vergara’s diamonds & rust (Toad Press International Chapbook Series). She is Managing Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, Associate Editor of Tupelo Press, Book Review Co-Editor at The Los Angeles Review, and Co-Editor of Matter. Together with Carlie Hoffman, she is the Curator of Poetry in Residence at the MinEastry of Postcollapse Art and Culture.