Across
- 6. Left by my mother at the aisle
- 7. His dead face through the coffin’s porthole, posthumous makeup as gaily colored as birthday cake icing
- 8. In the back of a one-time, the unpunished
- 9. I favour the flavor of Lin Yutang’s patriotism
- 14. Your would-be death is trespassing on this for-profit property
- 15. Cool, black mud hardening on scalp
- 19. Pro-grammar programmer
- 20. Prescribed in place of an antidepressant by a mendacious doctor
- 21. Locked out at the scene of death on high, loitering by closed gates, rusty
- 23. There is no “back,” for how can you return to a place from which you have never departed, have never even seen?
- 25. I am a young miss with a colonialist father; I am river-drowned
- 26. Making a mountain out of a mole: A roofbeam pins in a house fire
- 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
- 30. When the cane snapped in half against my flesh I thought a bone had been broken, such sting it had
- 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. Brought together by a bang, which is to say a false negation
- 2. But I spoke perfect American English in my head
- 3. Small body pulsing to death in my inadequate cupped hands; why did I not adjust my breathing?
- 4. Someone else's butchered tongue sliding on top of mine, slipping in, or out -- I can't decide which is more glorious
- 5. The only ones who try to swim in that lake are drunk, heartbroken, or both
- 6. You can tell how many times someone has killed themselves by their neck
- 10. Children, themselves of color, gleefully raining racial epithets like confetti upon me
- 11. Taken for Japanese; Vietnamese; Korean; Hawaiian; a Muslim violating rules; native; half
- 12. Nearby lived the headmaster, rumored to have hacked his electricity meter for lower bills
- 13. Sobs under a spinning fan in a room full of clustered people brimming over with slaphappy malice
- 16. Tolerated in sons, but not in daughters
- 17. Drinking forbidden elixirs to exercise unseen rebellion, couched in language serving Buddha
- 18. Might as well be somewhat strong if you can’t be beautiful
- 22. Durian-splitting knife grazing teenaged wrist
- 24. A marriage ghosting into view, overshadowing another lifting its fist beside
- 28. Sketching an unknowable map, one last choice leading to another
- 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