Sept.17~ MARISSA ZHU

Today's spotlight is on bilingual poet Marissa Zhu, who brings us "Lips and Teeth" (唇齒相依), "Of Camphor and Hibiscus," and "Anhui White." Thank you, Marissa, for sharing your gift for words with SHINE! 

Lips and Teeth (唇齒相依)

There are thirty to sixty Chinese idioms
for mutual dependence.
My grandmother’s favorite was 相依為命—
to depend on each other for life,
to become one another’s only tether.

She said it often,
holding my mother,
who was only a child.

A unit of two
pressed against the lit window.

Husband, wife, daughter, son,
bright red lanterns strung together.

My grandmother and mother
stood at the margins of celebration
invited in, welcomed
like firecrackers popping at the gate—
loud, brief, swept from the doorstep
once the night ended.

At the end of every season—
New Year’s, Mid-Autumn, Dragon Boat—
they were folded back into the big city,
returned to the small gravity
of 相依為命.

My favorite idiom is 唇齒相依—
lips and teeth, each
depending on the other
to keep the mouth intact.

My mother is the lips:
labia oris, vermillion border,
soft seam over canine.

There are cases:
people gone mad on drugs, or grief, or illness,
who chew off their own lips.

So I know
with enough force,
I could tear mine clean off. ​

Of Camphor and Hibiscus

At night, mother’s roots drink
sips from my water table.
Her pillow is drenched
in camphor and hibiscus.
The earth swallows both our shadows
spits one back.
Whose legs am I wearing today?
I pick a stem,
press it to my wrist.
She blooms complaints. 

Anhui White

You left to work the fields, but the camera loved your face, so they gave you a seat at the mayor's mahjong table.

The mayor of Taiwan gifted you broad-leaf Anhui white in a cup veined black crackling through cream, gold at the rim. Click, click, post.

Behind the photo, Vietnamese workers bent at the waist, fingers sorting leaves by grade. Cropped from the frame.

Now you're back, steeping that tea for me in the fracture cup. My kitchen in Hamtramck. steam on the windows. It tasted of a wildness– not grassy, not medicinal.

Somewhere a river widens to let its stones pass. Somewhere a row of backs bends and unbends without cameras, without chairs, without names.

Before you left, I held out my porcelain canister, pink peonies dense on white, no bigger than a fist. You squinted. Don't you have something bigger?

I didn't want to take too much. But you pulled one leaf free by its serrated edge, held it to the candlelight: whole, intact, not the familiar cut or crumble.
​
To press them into that painted mouth would crush them. I gave you the mason jar with the wide-mouth lid. You filled it. Then reached for a second.

Marissa M. Zhu is a Chinese American poet and physician-educator based in Detroit. By day she directs assessment at a medical school; by night she writes about desire, inheritance, and the body's quiet economies: what we collect, what we lose, and who we become when no one is watching. Her poems have appeared in Voicemail Poems, Opol, and PHIL LIT journal. She writes The Wanting on Substack (@marissamzhu) and is at work on her first manuscript, 'May I Have Your Attention?'

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