It’s the County We All Hate

I’ve dreamed of revisiting that street:
the way leaves dissect sunlight, or how
the heat of the electric bike burns through my skirt.
It’s a flow of wind, which blows through my ear
to blur my vision. Passengers walk slowly,
dwelling in small, sticky shadows of summer.

It’s the county we all hate:
there are no malls or supermarkets or convenience stores.
Only laoban and laobanniang, who sat at the door
of the stationary store, their faces dissolved
behind the sagging veil of plastic.
A shop no wider than a hallway—
fluorescent light flows on the erasers:
sushi, pineapples, fish that never swam.
The shelves sag with dust and cheap design.

The erasers wait in shallow boxes,
twisted into shapes that forgot their use.
My mom signed. She folded her complaints
in the box of erasers she handed me:
I became the coolest kid in the classroom.
Only for one day. The next day,
the other kid with his fluorescent
pencils stole my position.

I faded back to walk back into the neighborhood
passing two underconstructed buildings
& two snack stores & three breakfast stores.

We have nothing except for these architectures.
Ginkgo leaves devoured the streets’ asphalt pavement,
slowly swallowing the accented Mandarin.
My parents resist teaching me our local dialect
So maybe that’s why the underconstructed buildings
eventually evolve to be unfinished.
Broken glass crunching under dirt-caked shoes,
when children flee the after-school hall,
Ceramics rise like tired pedestrians
shadows drifting through windows
or crawling along plaster,
the house half-asleep, watching,
sinking in that summer.
Laoban and Laobanniang left:
they told me they would be on the
other side of the same street,
which turned out to be another breakfast store.

Now we have four breakfast stores, but maybe even more.
It’s the county we all hate, so no one ever bothered to return.
But when nights dwell another similar summer’s shadow,
the electric bike, covered in dust,
quietly bleeds itself out of the darkness.
To where I once again felt the wind on that street,
blowing through me from the front to the back.
I was the coolest kid in class
when I rode the bike through the streets,
when I slipped through the corners
with a handful of erasers,
when I stepped on the Gingko leaves
in a rainy summer day.

It’s the sixth year I’ve been apart.