Guanyin shows up on the radiator again, dripping mercury and raspberry slushie. She’s in a knockoff hello kitty tee, sipping grandma’s 番茄蛋汤 through the nostril of a dolphin-molded straw. Not my nostril. I am bleeding out of one nostril like a failed oracle. There is a test on derivatives of angles. Nothing acute. In the margins, I draw lotus roots with arterial veins, each petal a posthumous apology. 3 a.m a few nights ago, I woke up dreaming I slipped into a Nanjing freezer. Inside me, ancestors curled up between fish balls. The 老板 hollowed out dead cheese, slurped down strings unheated. Feels like a metaphor for assimilation. There is a hole on my left sock, and hence a blood rinsed toenail. Shame leaks from it like vapor from a street dumpling cart. Guanyin doesn’t say much. Silence — or wet, Massachusetts hair. I tried mailing me home once in a box of expired haw flakes. Post office declined. Origin and destination too similar. I watch a wasp drown in the origins, the teacher’s lukewarm soda. No one mourns the dying choreography. Sometimes, I think I am a backup dancer in someone else’s reincarceration. Breathe deeply, exhale your GPA. Inhale a scented candle called “Late Capitalism.” Guanyin Blinks — cherry blossom falls from her eye like a middle school insult — and places a sticker on my forehead: FRAGILE / MAY CONTAIN HISTORIC GRIEF. I stand to sharpen my pencil. On the floor, I map red. Later, I will eat lunch, pretending the dumplings are sacred. She will appear, again, through the plumbing, speaking dialects to be translated in humble humidities, and prepare three versions of my grief: 1.Minimalist 2.Maximalist 3.In the style of Björk, but wet. I will enter zero and return myself to the store of mildly defective daughters. Ma’m, please don’t judge me the next time you hover above the circuit breaker and read my poem comparing heartbreak to government surveillance