By: Adriana Rewald
Timezones
I must forgive those
of single-zoned mind
when they forget
my temporal existence
revolves around the sun,
and not their Sunday
afternoon convenience.
Every call involves
calculations. Charts
to determine who’s in what
state of mind
when: Venn diagram days
with slivered overlap,
cut-offs and ungodly
hours to consider.
The meaning of connection
Dopplered by both space
and time here, varied
as the languages we do
and don’t and try
and fail to speak.
The Anatomy of a Mandible
Of course my jaws aren’t cookie cutter
but they still have a spot to be hit.
Needle-deep in muscle spitting
out its payload the numbness spread
up my cheekbone. Tap-tap, nothing,
tap-tap. Odd to feel from only one
nerveside, the other switched off.
So, I was eating stroganoff
with only half a tongue at lunch
that day. Careful not to catch a layer
of cheek between teeth with the noodle.
I leave dentistry to the imagination,
considering sightlines, keeping
the biggest instruments mysterious (even
when they’re already inside). Tilting
the head this way, opening wide, rolls eyes
away from the action. My understanding
of my own mouth exists in a mirror
universe where to engage the hinge
enough to see all the spots plastered,
or openly decaying, is work. Hard work
and exhausting. Better to just use my body
parts as I have always done and leave
the rest to someone else to sort out.
From an Epitaph Found in the Foreigner’s Cemetery on Changzhou Island
Under this Stone
Lieth Interred a man who sailed into a port where he most likely didn’t know the
language. Though perhaps I am being overly-critical, as
often happens since I arrived in this port myself, not
knowing the language. Only I came by airplane, and
with a pandemic breathing down my neck. So, that’s
different, right?
The Body of Cap. Daniel Webb
of the London East India Ship
Whose Death, I imagine, must have been something of a profound
tragedy to whoever commissioned this inscription. Or
they were fulfilling some order delegated to prove their
honor for a man of great privilege. Top dog on an armed
merchantman, a large, muscular ship, full of large,
muscular assumptions.
Will be most severely lamented
By all that ever knew him Captain Daniel, I imagine, did not bathe very often, and
probably had a wife in England to whom he was
unfailingly unfaithful. And yet, here he is being clicked
through search engines 240 years later, though the
empire he served and the empire that issued his customs
clearance are both now just as dead as he*
He was Modest
Mild Humane Affable and Liberal
A Faithful Friend
A Good Man There’s no arguing with a tombstone when no other
records are easily searchable on the internet. Hard not to
wonder what the words humane and liberal meant to an
Englishman running a wealthy trading vessel in a city
where to this day there are arguments about whether
they were ever really colonized. Technically –
technically – said the Englishman over a third drink at
Hooley’s Irish Pub in Tianhe in early 2021, his Chinese
university students can’t whinge about being colonized,
since Britain never conquered the whole of China. They
were just in Canton. You have to be a country to be
colonized, according to this professor.
As no one stood higher in the esteem
of his Brother Officers Hard not to wonder upon what was this esteem built? I
find myself questioning every aspect of history these
days, to the chagrin of certain contemporary British men
living in Guangzhou who are weary of all this new
political correctness and undermining of a perfectly
good historical and literary canon. A canon which they
can magnanimously bestow upon their star-struck
students, being uniquely qualified to do so, keepers of
the history written by their ancestors.**
But back to Captain Daniel. Who crashed his ship into the HMS
Russell off the coast of St. Helena, 2 years and 14,000
kilometers from where he would wind up dead. Some captain
he must have been. Though it could have been the Russell’s
fault; the records aren’t very clear on that.
His loss to them
Will be sincerely felt
and most heartily deplored
Who loved you so much, Danny Boy? Who went to the trouble
of crafting this oblong ode? It lasted long enough to be
forgotten and rediscovered in the right now that will one day be
back then. And those of us who get starry-eyed with history take
what we can from your incomplete information etched into
stone on a hill on an island in the Pearl River Delta, where
European crews hired local sailors to help them navigate the
sinewed riverways, to dock at an ancient port and work through
customs, unload their Western stock and buy up a cargo of
goods that was sure to bring a profit back home.
He died at Canton the 1st of Dec 1780
in the 38th year of his Age
Nothing here says the London ever made it to Canton, only that
he did, and that he was once its captain. Daniel Webb, did you
resign in disgrace and abscond to the Orient? Did you fall in
love there? Did that person know how it broke you to lose all
that capped your manhood? Did they try to reboot your image
in the wake of your death? A rebranding of the canon to satiate
a restless soul? A rewriting of history no one could question?
I’ll give you this: in a time where few people lived past forty,
Captain Daniel must have been particularly spry, to have made
it halfway around the world before having the audacity to up
and die.
Of all the reasons to be left behind, that is perhaps the most sensible one.
Adriana Rewald (she/her) is a writer and translator who was born in Detroit and raised in Warsaw, Poland. She received her MFA from Hollins University and her poetry has appeared in Artemis, Toho, Poets Reading the News, High Shelf, and on poets.org. While her home bases are in Michigan and Poland, her work as an international school teacher has taken her to South Korea, Serbia, and, currently, China.
*Meaning: remains left to be found, to influence and intrigue.
Engraved nostalgia for the entities history deemed worthy of remembrance.
**(After Hooley’s there was no second date, by mutual ghosting.)
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