My grandmother was born in a city called [宜兰]
Despite its name, no orchids grow there
Five of my six aunts have names ending in [兰]
My mother’s full name is [little wind]
Orchid seeds are distributed by land, water, & wind
One of my aunts drowned in a river I invented from rain
One of my aunts thinks skydiving is a synonym for when it rains
the other way
One of my aunts faked her visa & went to the vet once
thinking it was the doctor
she asks me how come dogs here have doctors
I say because dogs here are domesticized
the opposite of domestic is alien the opposite of flower
is fist the opposite of purple is pray
orchid comes from the Greek word meaning [testicle]
Greek women believed eating orchids made their unborn
babies boys
for a son, my mother creamed her toes suckled coals liquefied flies fucked on full moon
days flossed with a dagger darkened her bathwater ashed her cheekbones torched her crotch
candied the blood boiled it with sugar & still
she wept when she saw my face
filmed it with her fingers
weeded out my eyes & witched them into rivers
my grandfather farmed orchids in a city named thirst
when the war came, he pissed on his field
to keep the orchids alive, he spent all his body’s water
his organs dehydrated into stones I skip across seas
flowers bruise in the wind & weaponless
crimes are called births
water perpetrates want
the army unburied our bodies in a field of salty orchids
everyone in my family resembles someone dead
in photos our faces overlap like venn diagrams of grief
there is a breed of orchid called the ghost orchid & another breed called the blood orchid
one is fictional & the other is edible & the other
day I fist a girl & do not think of extinct species
decades later reappearing like the coelacanth
one of the original fish that left the sea for land
all migrations begin as mothers as mimicry
a fish saw a tree & decided to stand
without feet my brother says orchids
look like pussies smell like
pussies too he says I should know
I do know I know the color of thirst
is not salt but cinder but a city fired from the face of its map
her spit is my river is my silver
bullet thirst
is the mouth’s unit of memory memory
begins in me like a bone
to multiply its breaks