Robert Gao
Oh, Jie—our father, adorned with the waxen spit from colleagues,
candied in teething denim and Marlboros in orbit, our father—
he will still drive us home. He will take us by the lip and play us
headfirst in the next hand, the trunk of the 1990 Toyota Camry:
maybe this is where profits rebirth. Where commercialization
meets entrepreneurship, where siblinghood becomes elegized in
vinyl cards. Groups of five, no less. Because father needs the full hand
to confirm its efficacy: whether Jie and I are playable or must keel into
a fold, tucked into the chasms of the scrap deck. Our competition
is heavy on this night; two evangelized men with twins baptized in rust
pushing all their chips into the pile, as if to say blind faith always
overtakes two low cards, as if to say fold away your investments,
father’s seven-year forage in the immigration tents an afterthought.
The sunk-cost fallacy: Jie, christened by her economics professor. Jie,
selling her virginity in the dingy Walgreens bathroom for Adderall
to plunge through each nostril. Jie, letting the blue capsules
carve formulae as they ricochet down her esophagus,
so she can cashier at the whitewashed Cantonese restaurant
and still exchange demureness for a passing GPA. Father calls
when the greasy lawyer reveals his family of six strong, matching his bet
because I was born to fight. Not to be caught naked midflight,
like Jie who father discards for a seven of clubs. When he lights
his last cigarette, he raises—and Jie mutates into camphor,
takes another stranger into the desecrated stalls of Lai Lai Wok,
unfastens his belt with the fingertips she traced her opportunity cost on—
anything to raise the value of the hand. I want to self-desecrate. I want
to play martyr too, but the doctor who conceals a deck raised in the suburbs
has Narcan on standby, ready to trawl my corpse to add diversity to his hand.
Whenfather goes all in, when the men wax their teeth with caviar,
when Jie limps out of the dive piss-slicked and half-starved, when
I shuffle the scrap deck with my hands and kilt myself asymmetrical—this is
when economics becomes myth. This is when Jie and I are martyred, elegized,
every verb insufficient to cut our losses. This is when father uncorks the cigarette
from his lung, aims the Toyota toward the fallen camphorwood on the freeway,
tethers the seven of clubs into our writhing mouths before man-made steel
converges into our limp body, the worthlessness of it.
罗伯特·高是一位来自伊利诺伊州的华裔美国作家。他荣获 2024 年美国中西部地区国家学生诗人称号，并获得本宁顿学院、国家青年艺术基金会、学乐艺术与写作奖以及《纽约时报》的认可。他的作品发表于《Adroit Journal》、
《Lumiere Review》和《2024 年最佳青少年写作》等刊物。他是 2023 年《Adroit Journal》夏季指导项目的诗歌校友，并计划在斯坦福大学学习英语和创意写作。这些诗歌发表在 2024 年国家学生诗人项目期刊上，经作家授权与香槟丛刊读者分享。