Johanna M. Costigan is a writer from New York who lives in Shanghai, China.
Baby Diplomacy
No wonder the jails don’t fill. English was offered as enrichment; some people are their own identifiers. Stop reprimanding her for painting the subway or claiming the abandoned money. She was just doing the bare minimum under improvised provinces; promises stepping over city lines. Europe, the paper weight, overshared.
I built a pool between the rich and one digit. Or? And? Shut up the conjunctions. They wrote through thunder. No one corrected counterparts: bilingual beings, who were they to decipher foreign dictionaries–dignitaries mostly just wait in line anyway: don’t they?
~
Foreign Clients
I couldn’t tell if it was a tick or a freckle. Either might itch. The traditional kind of baby advertises itself. I took a bath underground, listening to the city stomp. Clean–but still itchy–I chose the stairs.
So many people turn to inanimate objects. Over the elevator’s panting, complaints bounced off metal walls, a synesthetic rainbow of ringtones. They answer but insist–in perfect Mandarin–on English.
~
Not Necessarily
Your sidewalk tomb fire was happening tomorrow, but I never left the last night
like the juice no one brings up, the huge cities we don’t talk about
the birth, about the death, about the difference between health and medical, whoever labeled you able bodied wasn’t wrong.
Sitting still? The next article you read will say it’s the cure forward,
you chew with a hard silk tooth, the taste of blood
between meals and the headache when
you picture rat heart moving.
Citizen journalists admit that there is not just one system swimming
taxing before it thinks
we investigate: hot on the bus, trees planted late,
that afternoon you spent overlapping in bed.
You were quiet when it rained. Our eyes sat on you. Everyone didn’t explain.
When the other birds died we didn’t have to ask why.