Bangkok, Thailand

Bangkok, Thailand

One day, I will return
to the land of tricks:

the city is sexy because it does                                       “bang cock”
                                     it is                                                                 “thigh land”

When I told Singapore
I wanted men, my name
discreetly on my chest,
no one gasped.

Of course,
                                   the Thai boy wants to be pretty.
                                   It is so obvious from the sounds his mouth makes,
                                   every syllable supple like nourished skin.

To them, even Thai mafia
must come straight out
a tourism commercial:                                                                        “ยินดีต้อนรับ”
                                                                                                                           “Welcome to Thailand!”

They don’t know. In my language
                                   “flower” is the same word as                         “bitch”

I shoot metaphors as expletives.

                                   You are a stupid                                                     water buffalo
                                                      A secret-spilling                                 rat
                                                                       A White                                  guava

I make it extra polite, with                                                                  ครับ
                                                  attached, the sparkle after the spell.

They think I am saying, “This country is so beautiful.”

So they ask me how to master my language
because they want to retire with a subservient woman
who will love them only because the dollar
is stronger than the baht.

“You only learn from living there,”

I say, remembering how my stepfather
plucked my mother here, how she duped him
to bring me along,

how I grew up a faggot with a clipped tongue,

how I want so bad to render these people wordless,
                   flash my phallus collection,

weaponize my true form.

Bangkok, Thailand

I don’t know what to say, should you let me back.
‘I missed you’ is too obvious. Our reunion deserves more
than filler lakorn writing. I want a grand gesture:
a musical number from a boy with a broken voice

trying to charm his way home. As in: I am sorry for being
away this long, for making promises in the language
of soft landings and breaking them like Pocky sticks
under a wet market sandal. Out there, I have run

out of childhood snacks, so you must expect me back
all grown up. But really, I can only pretend. I don’t know
how to say ‘inheritance’ and ‘lawyer’ and ‘documentation’
the way you would understand. I can barely hold the line

with my estranged father, who thinks an email is just a cat
scurrying through his phone. But I know. Your words
are beautiful as I remember it, my mother tongue. I can only
mimic it, every sound in my mouth a furball from gut to lip—

‘แม็กคึดถึงนะ’:

Not ‘I missed you’, but

‘Max has thought of you every day since.’

Bangkok, Thailand

They’ve put the ซอย on Google Maps now.
I jump in, and everything is grimy as I remember it:
oil layers shielding the coconut cream;
black specks sprinkled on tarnished ground.

That night, when we turned our backs to home,
I became my mother’s parrot. Of course,
I liked it better here. The air is clean.
The roads are clean. No one threw trash
for someone poorer to pick up. We weren’t
allowed to chew gum, and that saved me
many trips to the dentist. I would grow up
so rule-abiding, when my thighs stopped
marching and could only wheeze and walk,

I sat them down for a scolding: Why won’t you
work for it? Don’t you want a better life?
As if there was one future, and it could
only be here. As if I flew away to escape
the sewers and exhale above ground. But I see it now.
You can never scrub grime off a boy raised
from muck. I would be insufferably dirty,
could never clean up right.

On the Maps, I see it: the black spot
I once said was the house’s beauty mark.
Back home, moles are signs of wisdom,
visible only after the body has learnt enough.

And then, there are my cousins, born
just years before me, caught blurrily
by Google’s camera, slinging noodles and soy sauce
to send my nephews to school. How they’ve
loved the land as the building rotted above them.
They never wanted to clean anything up.

And I am supposed to be grateful here.
I escaped my noodle boy destiny.

And yet,

and yet,

I am not there.

Bangkok, Thailand

a queer(er) translation of Angkarn Kallayanapong’s “Scooping the Sea”¹

Scoop up the sea, pour onto a plate.
It goes so well with white rice.
Pluck stars off the sky like berries.
Wash and mix with salt. Bon appetit! 

Look. Crabs and oysters are vibing,
dancing till the playlist runs out.
Chameleons and millipedes fly up
to munch on the sun and moon. 

Toads climb atop a gold palanquin,
float to heaven, the perfect vacation.
The marketing works. Bullfrogs go too.
Angels, overrun, flee into coconut husks. 

Earthworms are turning into playboys.
Apsaras are shivering in the sky.
Suddenly, every microbe and amoeba
is too bougie to look you in the eye. 

The gods are bored being gods,
they come for their first taste of shit.
Somehow, they give it five stars on Yelp:
“So magical, I’ve lost my tongue!” 

The forest, abundant with bushes,
follow the discourse on PhilosophyTube.
The overworked sawdust sleep-talks,
as it calculates the weight of shadows. 

The magic out there is so grand,
don’t stay here, you silly little fool.
The world is just an angry drunk.
Soon, everything heavy will turn light.