Gao Jianxiang’s Ghosts of Love // An Anthropology of Gay China

Gideon Huan-Lang

Here, the car engines are asthmatic. Buildings wheeze 
from our careless cigarettes. We smoke

to share spit. But smoke like this is reserved for the dead,
rising from graves littered with rotten oranges. 

Like our ancestors, the city’s billboards turn 
their graffitied eyes away. But neon light deflowers

our curtains, watching us give each other 
new bruises. Comrade, you lie 

bare-chested between me and the television static
that duct-tapes our mouths together. 

You tell me you’re undressing

for the Shenzhen heatwave. You tell me despite 
the whirring AC. And the small factory cot 

is suddenly big enough to hold the marriage 
of our sweat. There is a new scab 

on your knuckle—an urn of new dead 
cells. I wrap satin around your sweatshop scars, 

as if veiling the plastic brides of Dong Men Street
before sunrise. Under some of these high-

rises lie Bronze age bodies. The archaeologists hypothesize 
that some were like us—some must have been;

We were both first-born sons. Our Tsingtao beer 
remains untouched at the village table. We let 

Buddhist fruit rot with the wine-red corpses as we mix
our work gear.

Gideon Huan-Lang (郎健) is aspirationally cyborg-esque. He is a digital humanities student moonlighting as a poet from the Pacific Northwest.