Naomii Seah
You only notice us when we are dying
These people are dying.
Hospital wards, full to the brim
with infectious diseases:
within 20 years we’ll have dysentery—again.
It’s the Chinese; can’t believe what they eat
say white men who have
never known the hollow taste
of clay earth wrapped around street meat
which gums up in your stomach,
and grows hard, puffing it up like a weather balloon,
so you can float far from the scum-stained streets
of nowhere pretty—
Who have never lived in-between pavements, fighting for air;
packed into slum-city tents, townhouses, skyscrapers—
it’s all the same. Illuminated in haphazard rows
like kumquats from exotic locales,
waiting to be shipped.
Who have never packed up and left, half a mandarin peel
still crusted under fingernails, red packet wrapped in undies
comically tied onto a mango-tree branch, to strike out all alone
half a world away—because the callus on your fingers
is a penny-sized pound of flesh
that you exchange for the right to clean air and free healthcare
and at the end of the day, in a cold house
with a mouthful of foreign slurs, pricked a finger
to send paper-cut cheques back home—
for your father, whose suffering means nothing, anymore.
You only notice us when we are dying.
Naomii Seah is a poet, writer and creative from Tāmaki Makaurau. She is currently studying for a BA(Hons) in English at the University of Auckland. Her work has previously appeared in Starling, Critic, Mayhem and Takahē.