ODE TO NURSES, LOVE HOTELS,
AND MARILYNS ON THE COVERS OF PLAYBOY
I see two nurses kissing at the gay club,
their latex dresses and Florence Nightingale caps
and white heels straight out of my childhood
dreams of being like Hello Nurse
from Animaniacs, that blonde bombshell
sex goddess cartoon with cleavage stacked
like bookshelves and red lips even tastier
than the pizza she nibbled on in that scene
when Yakko and Wakko sing about her 160+ IQ
and multiple PhDs, but you know what
they were really drooling over,
leaving seven-year-old me to wonder
what place a little Asian girl has in this world
of ’90s Marilyn Monroes running in slo-mo
on the beach wearing red swimsuits,
their nipples perking up on primetime,
or fair-skinned sex kittens on the covers of
Playboy, Hustler, and whatever men read
“for the articles,” girls-next-door
with baby faces and bare bums,
while twenty-five-year-old me thinks
about getting a guy who can “do both,”
because the kissing nurses are two blond pretty
boys with just enough muscle, and oh,
how every time I’m attracted to a guy,
I think about what he’ll look like in a dress,
because I refuse to be the only one with
feminine wiles, and it’s funny how we’re
turned on by the simplest things,
how love hotels in Japan have “Under the Sea”
themed rooms, and what woman wouldn’t
want to get fucked dressed as a mermaid
and “In the Space Station,” a ’70s James Bond
romp in the golden sack, then of course,
the Victorian rooms and the hot tubs
surrounded by Roman pillars, and the red
bird cages for a little midnight dance,
but what if I’d rather play doctor than
nurse, or teacher than schoolgirl,
or fly you rather than ride you? Or why can’t
we have a go on the carousel
in the middle of the funhouse, surrounded by
carnival mirrors, because I like you a little scared
riding that horse, wrapped in my arms.
ODE TO SEXPOTS AND MY MOTHER’S RED STOCKINGS
All my mother wanted as a little girl was a pair
of red stockings, her childish version of elegance,
the way scarlet would pop against her clothes,
and I think about this when she sends me a package
of fishnets, because I like things a little sexpot,
a little oh honey, it’s not what I did, but what
I can do to you tonight, and how my mother wanted red
so bad it gave her a fever, because she grew up
with three siblings in a closet-sized Hong Kong apartment,
my grandmother running the pajama stand downstairs,
my grandfather working in HR, bringing life-size dolls
with glass eyes from Europe and watches from Sweden,
but never anything a girl wanted, and I see this image of my mother
at fifteen at the dinner table: she and her sisters rush
through Grandfather’s noodles so they can run downstairs
to the candy store before closing time, and let’s face it:
my grandfather’s never been the best cook, and my mother’s stuffing
her face with vegetables when my father walks in—
he’s twenty-nine, a friend of my grandparents and that weird age gap
between being too young to be their friends and too old
to date my mom, but I know the way she’s looking at him,
the movie star of her apartment, like this could really be
something, but boy bye, I need to buy my chocolates first
before closing time, and we’ll have a year to get together.
ODE TO SUSHI, SASHIMI, AND THE EELS IN THE TANK
My father hates sushi,
and that’s the Chinese tiger in him talking
at the rotating sushi belt restaurant
in Causeway Bay, Hong Kong,
as I grab a slab of sweet corn nigiri,
my dreams of eating corn on everything
since the day I was born, now coming true,
and Dad sticks to his grilled hamachi,
dumplings, and the sake we’re chugging,
wondering why I craze over fatty tuna
belly and scallop and striped bass and sweet
shrimp, because to him, it’s just hunks of raw fish
atop rice, made to look pretty,
not to taste good, but if he only understood
chewing a piece of squid forever,
or tasting the sponginess of tamago egg
just as sweet as it is yellow,
or taking a lesson from The Three Bears:
sashimi that’s not too thick, not too thin,
and behold foie gras sushi,
nigiri with mango cubes—
ahhhh to all the wonders of mackerel,
the beauty of the shrimp head,
the chirashi bowl, like a garden of flowers
from Wonderland, complete
with cucumber centerpiece,
and seaweed salad that looks like mermaid’s hair,
but when the unagi on rice bed comes,
I’m three again, remembering
the times we visited the wet market together,
looking at the eels in the tanks,
me hiding behind him,
my shield, my knight, the tiger that
growled at the water snakes jetting their heads
out the tanks, as I begged to leave, crying,
wanting ice cream instead of this erotica:
eels necking each other,
trying to neck me in, suck on me,
and Dad would grab my hand,
buy me a strawberry cone, a red bean cone
for him—on the walk home, a cone
in one hand, a bag of lychees and cherries
in the other, he’d stop to buy me
the stuffed gorilla with the big nostrils
I pointed at outside the toy shop window.
Dorothy Chan is the author of Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold (Spork Press, forthcoming March 2018) and the chapbook Chinatown Sonnets (New Delta Review, 2017). She was a 2014 finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, and her work has appeared in Blackbird, Plume, The Journal, Spillway, Little Patuxent Review, The McNeese Review, Salt Hill Journal, and others. Chan is the Assistant Editor of The Southeast Review. Visit her website at dorothypoetry.com
theboilerjournal.com 