> how often I have chosen love
You're tuning into Cheers, a newsletter made by Tiffany Xie. This week: a reimagined Thanksgiving, poetry duets, sci-fi, and how often I have chosen love.
Hello friend,
> Priya Krishna cooks a minimal-waste Thanksgiving meal (low-key kind of want a worm farm right now). To be honest, I’m a bit suspicious of “zero waste” as a viable form of sustainability activism, not least because when the dining halls went “zero waste” it just meant that the silverware became compostable and the bins filled with a different kind of trash, but I was delighted to listen to Priya talk to Dominique Drakeford about inclusion among environmental activists. Wanting to continue learning.
> Just finished reading Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars (h/t Lauren) and Danez Smith’s Homie, which pair beautifully together. Of the many poems in these collections I’m still thinking about, I think you should read “They May Love All That He Has Chosen and Hate All That He Has Rejected,” in which Tracy K. Smith considers five hate crimes and writes postcards from the victims to their assailants, and Danez Smith’s “dogs!”, which is about dogs, but not really.
> Currently reading Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (h/t Coleton) because I want to read more science fiction. I loved his young adult novel, Ship Breaker, when I was in high school, so it’s strange returning to his writing again, now that I’m older.
> You must read Alyssa Wong’s “All the Time We’ve Left to Spend,” a short story about a future in Japan where pop stars’ memories are downloaded and then uploaded onto synthetic robot versions of themselves that live inside a love hotel—also about a lot more—it’s so good.
> Pair with Rina Sawayama’s “Tokyo Love Hotel.”
> “梦” by Xiao Yue Shan, from her chapbook, How Often I Have Chosen Love:
I lay my head down on a pillow pilled
with characters, yellow tracks and traces
of the name I was given. I sleep
on chinese every night. I speak
dialects inside my head, words strange and
pelagic. words harnessed to a shore. language
that asks for directions back to the main street,
for a second helping, for a mother. there is a child
whose head fits where mine does, upon
cotton worn to silk by years and years
of sleep. I do not know how to speak chinese
that does not belong to the child. I know how
to ask for milk but not scissors. I know how to ask
to be held but not to explain why. I bite down
hard on a word. black sesame word, warm tofu word,
morning words. in the mid-minute above waking
I remember every moment of a dream,
before forgetting.
> Feminist understory brought to you by the Guerilla Girls.
Cheers,
Tiffany