Vitamin Factory & Monologue of a Ginkgo Tree
Haolun Xu
Vitamin Factory
I started to refuse small objects. I wanted to subtract
anything that smelled too much like life. Even mochi,
or the coral candy, pink rice paste
and their lime green counterparts.
The luxury would return to my body,
stomach acid transforming to zinc.
I'd be like soil, with neither weeds nor flowers.
Now, only birds can grow out of the earth.
This is what can be observed as miraculous.
The art of nutrients,
growing without escape.
Warren Buffett said,
'we sleep, under the shade
of trees someone else planted,
a long time ago.'
I agree, I think surplus
has always been a very human problem.
The issue that when the wounds are closed
and there is no more passage for evil,
even the ground starts to transform.
All health can become a protest.
I'm proud of this, although even that is an estimation.
I think I'm doing this for my soul.
I'm going to save the world like this.
Monologue Of A Ginkgo Tree
i.
I'm helping my mom clean her apartment.
There's a photograph she finds,
that of me as a baby, being held by my parents.
It's a beautiful picture.
My mother's hair is short in this photo,
and she wears a pink windbreaker and a striped white sweater.
Behind her, the eye catches a ginkgo tree, green and yellow and blurry.
My father, my grandmother, all of China is holding the camera.
I carry a taro popsicle in my mouth
and my eyes are too big to stare directly at the camera.
Bundled up in blue, yellow, red, one can't tell if I'm a boy or a girl.
It is my claim to happiness, it is proof.
ii.
I yell at her. What magic is this?
This is betrayal. Who painted this,
who made this image?
This is nothing at all. That is no child.
That is a porcelain doll to carry around, it has tricked you all.
There's no names on the photograph.
There are only two strangers frozen in place.
Neither of them look at me, neither of them remember me.
I show my daughter later this very picture.
She says it does not look like me at all.
At night, I cannot sleep from the disgust.
The next morning, I throw the picture away.
Haolun Xu was born in Nanning, China. He immigrated to the United States in 1999. He was raised in central New Jersey and studied Political Science and English at Rutgers University.