Rachel Higson

my future love back then

The Walami Trail

瓦拉米 romanized into Wǎlāmǐ
Like the Japanese word marabi fern
Like the Bunun word maravi come with me / follow

I’ve come with another American teacher.
Her Mandarin is better than mine. But we’re just as strong.
We exchange the backpack every five kilometers,
Strapping red lines into our shoulders and stomachs.

The clouds arch their backs
White reaching for blue
With toes airing through the green mountains.
The sun sifts gold through leaves.
I sweat faster than I can drink.
I sweat a whole water cycle.

We look out at 佳心 jiā xīn good heart
Jiasun the Bunun word for gorgeous scenery
Reddened into a police station
During Japanese occupation.

A group of Taiwanese tourists brought pots, noodles, meat, vegetables, clothes, bags.

What did they say? That we’d have to hug to sleep in our tent. Too small.

The Bunun man with calves like trunks grown by the mountain,
Carried their pots, noodles, meat, vegetables, clothes, bags.

What did he say? He said you can have his cot in the cabin.
Where will he sleep? On the ground outside.
Tell him no but thank you. I did. But he said, it is his way.
And I wonder, is taking mine? But that’s not something I say.

I sleep under the roof.
She sleeps in the tent.
He sleeps under moon-blanketed trees.
We follow the dirt-parted ferns.
We follow the dirt beneath our feet.

Mandarin

My tongue twitches
and limps dumb
as a dead grouper
that used to flip swim flop

through all that water
with as much thought 
as a spark through an electrical wire
that I never noticed

because ignorance grows
as steady as slow as bark grooves.

I used to stay shut
with a rubber band
of pride holding together my
chest, my mind, all my insides,

but now I’m exposed,
a filleted fish
on the cutting board,
a poet with so few words

that I strip them for parts
just as a baseball bat
means nothing more than wood 
to a raging dumpster fire.

一七零九

一

1709
the name of a bar
in Hualien
on Taiwan’s east side

one thousand seven— 
how far I get in Mandarin 
before the bar owner tells me
to say it another way

一七零九
one and seven sound like
the word together and
nine sounds like alcohol,

and I have

零
líng
ling²
nought; nil
zero

idea until

he says handing me
a winter melon beer
that 零 sounds like
lim sounds like
drink in Taiwanese

Taiwanese Hokkien that survived
in the roots of betel nut trees
on the tips of elders’ tongues
through whispers 
between muddled Japanese

七

Truku
I ask because his
bar singer
says she is Taroko

Taroko
fogging the gorge
the Japanese name
the romanized way
to say

Truku
her indigenous
(aboriginal in Mandarin)
tribe who squinted
to see ocean from 
mountains

你好嗎?
in Mandarin
means 
hello
translates to
you good?

Embiyax su hug
in Seediq
spoken by Truku
means 
hello
means
are you strong?

enough
for the mountain 

九

The other American asks me
to translate a question for the Truku singer:

Is it bad to be indigenous
like in the US?

Question
in Mandarin
also means
problem.

Ta shuo shenme?
The Truku singer
asks me what
she said.

jiāo'ào
the word I look up to show her

yes
the Truku singer nods

Are you very proud to be Truku?
is what I translated
from American

About the Author

As a staff writer for the Prindle Post, Editor-in-Chief of A Midwestern Review, and a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Taiwan, Rachel Higson has superimposed her work and now poetry with a sociological framework in pursuit of new trails through the landscape of language.