Elegy for Kevin
Christina Wang
I.
In 2020, the world insists on apocalypse.
Family meals are now for exchanging
hypotheses about what waits for us in the afterlife.
When my mother tells me about the teenager who died
from COVID, I want to say, forget the masks.
Forget the Chinese superstitions about what will save us
from ourselves. It all should’ve changed after you, Kevin,
but we still inflate the lungs with delusion, as if anything
will hide the reeking of 200,000 body bags. I think about how
this country didn’t stop dead in its tracks 100,000 bodies ago.
How its underbelly churned onward in star-crossed conquest.
II.
I gave up on America before it was cool,
you say the day after the election.
Our parents cope by seeing which of them
can pronounce China the most like 45.
Chyy-na, they rattle off like scripture. Chyy-na,
they’re stealing our jobs. Chyy-na wants to kill us.
You’re the first to hold them when they finally break,
help them Google how to cancel American citizenship.
The Chinese translation for America is “beautiful country”,
and we decide that is no longer an option. We swear we must
find language closer to the truth. You know the mouth
as rebellion, Kevin, better than any of us do.
III.
I don’t know how to say suicide in Mandarin.
I don’t know what’s left to ferment on the tongue,
as if loss only begins at the departure from the body.
This is what I tell myself when I skip the funeral.
IV.
Your parents moved back to China in April.
They said being here was like witnessing
a thousand iterations of you die every day.
Each number, more and more helpless.
The whole affair, so stereotypically American.
V.
I want to demand answers in the same way you do.
We’re nearing 300,000 bodies in the United States. When
do I get to be selfish? How do I finally feel entitled
to discovery? Tell me where God hides in the afterlife.
Tell me if He really is benevolent, watching the corpses
outrun the graves. Show me where grief rears its head
into the body. I wonder if this is what you asked for
in the final moments.
VI.
You left, and America still rose from bed the next morning.
My parents wrote a check for the coffin before heading to work.
After you dropped out of Rutgers as a newly minted Marxist,
we burned my college essays & SAT books. You’re better than this, Christina,
you said. We watched thousands of dollars evaporate in the air.
You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. But I still took my
Biology final, still blew our parents’ money to retake the SATs
for a third time. Still applied to college with the stupid scores
and the stupid essay. I didn’t cry for days. I’ve learned to quell
the reverberations of your voice, Kevin. Today, 1,200
people died from the coronavirus in the United States.
I still log onto Zoom class.