Bury Your Gods

after War and Peace

and Mary is plain

she gets one line in the song and it is four words / she stops singing / she has run out of words to sing

i open my palm to her but from her first glance she does not like me / she has never liked me / we dance apart / i hold her gaze instead

instead, we insult each other in names / she is plain / i am heretic, and a pretender / perhaps we claim plainness a privilege, with her / beautiful eyes / inscribing poems about loneliness / burning hedonists to ash

she has found religion in the cracks of her father's glasses / glass chalices and chandeliers crack and she / bites her cries and she / is such a liar

still i reach for her / i want to dry out her voice, to crush it in my hand / have you learned your native russian or do you just sing for american audiences? / flaunt ethnicity but generalize, dressed in a qipao and i / am such a liar

her father taught her religion / they say keep your faith and it will persevere / my grandma taught me how to be Teochew / i was supposed to be renewed / she taught wrong / in the rebirth they never mentioned our singing

so, you must just trust our voices / as we trust our trying parents / i mean to say see how much we’ve forgotten / i mean to say keep us praying to non-denominational myths

Mary is plain / her eyes make up for her plainness / our eyes keep us from being plain and she is an angel / and i am anglicized / her father would be so proud if he were not so crazy i am not crazy / i am american

princess of moscow writes of her boredom and does not receive an answer / greedy and slanted eyes slit the envelope / we have learned that in looking upwards we may find a reason to do so / loneliness does not exist in holy books or genocide / take it in stride / ask for forgiveness

european gods are fake / bring me to Angkor Wat and tell me it is not sacred

Mary is plain / with uncommonly sad, beautiful eyes / she will never like me / she sings and her russian is mediocre