Here the cars are planets slowly streaming on their daily axis

A driver squints shot eyes through a windshield beyond which orbits

The same trees that green and shade and brown with leaves and bits

Of debris that accompany the drive from door to door diurnally

The suburbs offer wide open lawns with flat hands holding the sunset

Sucking a row of sparrows dot by dot into its deepening red

Is their sun a flaming threat or a beacon beckoning their flock ahead?

And what does this mean for me, with my plans and my dreams-

Is this a soft launch pad when all I need’s a cold hard reality check

And one in the bank, before I look back to this time when my imagination shrank

Two sizes too small for the wingspan it needs to take me where I want to be, it

seems.

Hello and thank you for spending your evening with us at pianist Jenny Q Chai’s

solo recital, presented by Ear to Mind. I am Anya Khalamayzer, the editor of Ear to

Mind Magazine’s third issue. I would like to say a couple of words before the

performance begins.

When I was first approached to help with this project, I was hesitant because I did

not have a musical background or formal training. I worried- as I still do- that I

might not do justice to the young masters featured tonight and in our pages. But

as I began to write and to research, I began to learn, and I realized that the

reason these musicians are still pursuing classical forms is because they too are

still learning them, their complexities and the strength of their subtleties.

We all stand on the shoulders of giants: of men and women who tinkered and

toyed with notes, distorted harmonies and treated melodies as architects

physically constructing sculptures. They experimented, and what they came out

with in the end was still called music, because it still touches us, even if we may

not know exactly why.

Composer and professor Reiko Fueting, who is here with us tonight, wrote to me in

response to a question I had about a musical theory- something about spectralism-

that although composers use a variety of techniques to create music, “in the end,

it is about music, not math, architecture, poetry, chaos theory, etc.”, and that

ultimately, the aims of these techniques are the same as those of an effective

argument: to move (us) and instruct (future generations of musicians). Let’s keep

that in mind tonight: if the music seems strange, or moving, or strangely moving,

it’s a result of the intersection between complex thought by the composer,

extensive training by the performer, and of our own complicated internal

processing.

That said, please turn off your cell phones, relax and enjoy.

when stuctures fall, they burn like temples

towers are vessels that fulfill a need to be held,

when they char as they come to an end-

bonds shuddering, crushed into loose plumes of dust,

sturdy wood crackling from suddenly useless backbone-

what you’d built disappears

though your tears gather powerless hunger to quench the process of flames

but what we lose, remains

it’s a belief inherited from my mother and buried into my silent pretext

to taste sadness alone, carrying one lost home to the next.

now I can’t shake the suspicion

that the altruistic instinct to protect small things is false

when I pity, my weak seed seeks out your shivering softness

and to feel you is wanting to heal myself;

and all hurts are the same, whether passed between hands

just where soft whispers planted warmth in you and good love grew,

or where shallow breaths still sting a place in the ribs

where my brother’s head lay before he passed away.

i believe pain creates a chain or a wave

where empathy turns empty holes into footholds for others,

just as loss digs away undergrowth for space

and flames clear a place for roots in new soil.

Love is a fist, a weight, an anchor,

A mermaid gesturing with rusted chains in hand.

I sweat you through months like rocks through wounds too thin,

crawling out of you like a shell shed by an adder

shutting her ruby eyes on your persistent getting-in.

A woman should be the thing that floats, unmoored by heavy-bellied stones,

yet often is the hunting hawk stiffened by a web of scars and poking bones.  

You sprout below my steps with the sinking softness of moss,

and instead of growing forward I dream right back into your thoughts.

You come to me in visions as I come alone in waves,

giving me both hope and grief, a plaster cast by rotting leaves

And biting teeth against a pillow cooled by a lack of body which moving, breathes.

I wish I loved an icon or a saint, a solid something to which this illness can grip

Claws raised against such questions as

why your alchemy carves some sunsets into grapefruits that drip

and your voids blanch some whiter than birch.

All the words I stumble towards you are just ways to tell this,

Fraying my nerves against myself for loving you is a waste that I won’t miss.

…Slow paced like ice melting,

But I’ll melt you with;

I lost the honey from my voice when I lost my accent,

But I gained a woman’s shape, so there was magic in the shift.

Don’t struggle with what runs in the blood

A message of love spread on the wings of your tongue

You ran to me under the radio tower in the rain

White dress silt -sprayed with water, what a shame, what a shame.

Chasing the same patterns each day,

I’m facing the rain, I’m a face in the rain…

With the sound of willows weeping

little leaves sweep by urban widows

crawling golden carpets for my thoughts to sleep in

urban windows opened to the summer rolls of thunder,

and I sweetly swimming deeply

in my sticky melancholy

thinking in your imaginary ocean breathing

you are the swift death of strong intentions,

like news of fracking fluids fracturing my cracking dirt

tamped firm by months and months of weighty silence

and my mind clocking days against fresh hurt,

like a bell tower crowning a field of scattered calendar sheets

through a land that sadly knows you won’t dock your ship inside my sea.

time wasting, he and I idly scan inside our lids,

one hundred mornings wrapping close and lazy in our jeans.

no secrets unlocked with intertwining breath and bones and complicity

no further intimacy than playing house on my shoulder can be

while I smile for what makes your strong lungs clean,

even if this is what I receive

when I shake up my citylocked legs

to jump free and run from your scene.

-Khalamayzer 2011
 

I remember when you drove us down the corridor of California One,

where sweeping stone walls fall away to the hand of the ocean

and a million car beams signal out in front of you

 knowing where they’re going, their life will be like diamonds.

The night hit that phosphorescent shade of blue.

I’d never been to California before I’d met you,

and it felt like magic.

The curve of your cheek, night-hidden eyes I could no longer see,

my mind was swimming with eels in dark bay waters;

yours was fixed on the road ahead.

I wanted to touch your hand and let you know

it was time to turn the wheel and kiss in the waves,

but you had never thought to die with me, even though you’d die for me.

Three fast years taught me that life calms you down,

fills you with unspoken wants through which you taste for smaller glints of magic

like the morning earthquake when I was in San Francisco next.

I woke up in another bed; by then I knew I couldn’t show you what it meant.

-Khalamayzer 2010