Migrant Epilogue
Annie Fan
And here’s our father deep in mechanics,
elbows splayed hyperbole as he spills green tea over
the table, now a line of itself, a turbine,
a function to hide behind. Last November, he cut work,
glazed coins with spit, rumpled dollars. Blurry
in the nights he rubbed sores with shea butter
and wrapped cold yellow rice with foil. Prepwork
better than hungry, he tells the open windows and finds
a wasp splayed across his tongue, honey seams rich
with lino grease – silver burr dreams, drawn
like slick gasoline. I saw him wake towerless
at midnight, lose struts, remember how
he wrapped bruises with kinder sums:
eyes pressed together like kisses. He taught me
how to fit a voice into a net, boxed and left
sucking past an engine he tore apart and crushed
in sighs; this night when he sleeps softless –
bone-dead vigour run from one point to another,
my father adds the ways he split himself:
parapets and odd angles, us shorn like fleas inside
a vacuum. Translated sideways until he was on
his back. His dreams where England bruised the same
way as a morning when I woke to a totaled car
and kept working on.
Annie Fan attends Rugby High School in Warwickshire, England, where she tries to synthesise and integrate. A Foyle Young Poet in 2015, her work is either stuck to the fridge or her hair or published in the Blueshift Journal, Yellow Chair Review and CASTILLO, among others. She is a prose editor at TRACK//FOUR.
Karen Pang was born and raised in Mauritius. She is currently transiting between Mauritius and Shanghai, specializing in both fashion and lifestyle photography. In search for authenticity and individuality, she draws inspiration from her island’s nature and people through her personal work.
