4X2
an online poetry journal
Photo "Silfra, Iceland" by Melissa Hotchkiss
American myth
by James Fujinami Moore
Uncle Frank tells me to name all the Chinese myths I know.
. . . the five identical brothers?
The five identical brothers, Uncle Frank says, is a fake myth made by the white people who can't tell the slant-eyes apart.
Opium, Uncle Frank says, was a conspiracy to keep the Chinaman impotent so he would not breed.
Uncle Frank tells me that I am not Chinese and sometimes I agree.
Sometimes over dinner he would tell the scariest story I knew.
The story was called The Big Chicken and it featured a big chicken. Bok bok.
Uncle Frank was not a chicken, he was a dragon.
Tall as the trees, with a flattening voice.
At his first wedding ceremony, he wore a gorilla suit.
His first wife lit herself on fire.
Uncle Frank is a recluse now.
The Big Chicken gobbles up the street, bok bok.
The Big Chicken is behind you as you run, bok bok.
You hear it eating the door as you sprint upstairs, bok bok.
Outside the window the world is lightless like it was before creation and for a moment just a moment you're safe.
Then an enormous gleaming eye fills the window, so close to touch.
Bok bok.
midnight at Banshee
by James Fujinami Moore
A dead boy walks into a bar
and orders a drink and the bartender says
We don't serve your kind, dead boy
and the dead boy nods
his perforated head
and dead cold vodka pours out.
The bartender wipes it up.
A dead boy walks into
a bar and sits next to a dead boy
and says what's wrong with him?
and the bartender says We don't
serve dead boys
and the dead boy lays his slit
throat right down
and out pours a sweet ice-wine.
Like he’s only asleep.
A dead boy walks into the bar
and says whaddya got? and the bartender says
Two dead boys and a cocktail and the dead boy
smiles wide. His tongue unfolds
into a grey-furred moth, clicking.
His teeth go crackle-
crack! I'll have what he’s having,
he grins, and his grin sloughs off its skin
and underneath is not a grin.
Poet's Statement: I think a lot of us have people in our lives who serve as the gatekeepers to our own cultures and identities. Growing up, Uncle Frank was mine. One afternoon over lunch, he told me that a man is not a part of a culture if he does not know its fairy tales, and that I wasn’t real Chinese. I treasure these moments when someone tells me I’m not really ____; sometimes, that absence makes for a good definition.
Banshee is a local dive bar that I used to frequent in grad school. It surprises me that more ghost stories aren’t set in dives; there’s a tinge of unreality & strange that comes with the dust on the good bottles. This was originally a Halloween prompt to write a poem about horror, but every time I try to write horror it ends up funny. Or the reverse.
Bio: James Fujinami Moore received his MFA in poetry from Hunter College. His work has appeared in Guesthouse, and the Pacifica Literary Review. He lives in New York.