Attempting to Narrate My Life Story Hungover and Very Far From Home

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Across
  1. 6. Left by my mother at the aisle
  2. 7. His dead face through the coffin’s porthole, posthumous makeup as gaily colored as birthday cake icing
  3. 8. In the back of a one-time, the unpunished
  4. 9. I favour the flavor of Lin Yutang’s patriotism
  5. 14. Your would-be death is trespassing on this for-profit property
  6. 15. Cool, black mud hardening on scalp
  7. 19. Pro-grammar programmer
  8. 20. Prescribed in place of an antidepressant by a mendacious doctor
  9. 21. Locked out at the scene of death on high, loitering by closed gates, rusty
  10. 23. There is no “back,” for how can you return to a place from which you have never departed, have never even seen?
  11. 25. I am a young miss with a colonialist father; I am river-drowned
  12. 26. Making a mountain out of a mole: A roofbeam pins in a house fire
  13. 27. Which allows me to turn out my pockets and say, see? There is nothing here; I have no backup nationality or rainy day culture squirrelled away; I have nothing if you do not grant me this
  14. 30. When the cane snapped in half against my flesh I thought a bone had been broken, such sting it had
  15. 31. Cheer bottled up and bubbled over, then dropped into an explosion that stained my socks red with a waterfall of blood sourced from the overhang of my knee
Down
  1. 1. Brought together by a bang, which is to say a false negation
  2. 2. But I spoke perfect American English in my head
  3. 3. Small body pulsing to death in my inadequate cupped hands; why did I not adjust my breathing?
  4. 4. Someone else's butchered tongue sliding on top of mine, slipping in, or out -- I can't decide which is more glorious
  5. 5. The only ones who try to swim in that lake are drunk, heartbroken, or both
  6. 6. You can tell how many times someone has killed themselves by their neck
  7. 10. Children, themselves of color, gleefully raining racial epithets like confetti upon me
  8. 11. Taken for Japanese; Vietnamese; Korean; Hawaiian; a Muslim violating rules; native; half
  9. 12. Nearby lived the headmaster, rumored to have hacked his electricity meter for lower bills
  10. 13. Sobs under a spinning fan in a room full of clustered people brimming over with slaphappy malice
  11. 16. Tolerated in sons, but not in daughters
  12. 17. Drinking forbidden elixirs to exercise unseen rebellion, couched in language serving Buddha
  13. 18. Might as well be somewhat strong if you can’t be beautiful
  14. 22. Durian-splitting knife grazing teenaged wrist
  15. 24. A marriage ghosting into view, overshadowing another lifting its fist beside
  16. 28. Sketching an unknowable map, one last choice leading to another
  17. 29. Father asking forgiveness, tears in eyes, paradise’s waves lapping in earshot, sometimes louder than the hotel buffet’s tinkling of cutlery, sometimes not