Tentacular
by Collier Nogues

After Shuan Tan’s The Arrival

I.

Our hero startles at what looks like his worst fear
emerging from beneath the hand of one
who’d seemed to be his friend: a child

sharing his pet. The pet
is catlike, its tail tentacular and black,
same as the shadows easing ever nearer to our hero’s

wife and daughter back across the sea.
So near to the surface his fear is, so easily
called forth by a ghost of resemblance,

or by perfect resemblance as drawn
by the artist, who means to make us see
the immigrant’s fear as a mistake

even as we see it is correct. We recognize
his trauma in his misrecognition of a pet.
We see what damage can be done by one

immigrant to another by sheer
accident, both of them
always, almost, never safe.

II.

Threats confuse with whimsy, too,
here in Tai Po, whose traffic surveillance camera takes
the shape of a birdhouse painted chalky pink.

Every day another flare of protest art appears
someplace I’ve not looked closely at before: red words
on the underpass, white on the street. Meanwhile

the shattered Maxim’s Cakes sign and the Bank
of China glass have been swept up, their storefronts sealed
by glossy cardboard painted white. The city’s surfaces

are all changed from what they were.
Last month the MTR posted an ad for “Gurkha
security” and just like that, we were returned

a century, the likeness shocking in its shamelessness.
The corporation reminds us it is owned mostly
by the government, and both are bald

in their willingness to pit some of us
against the others, to use the tools
they had, only on the face of it, seemed to put aside.

III.

The Arrival is only the arrival. There is
no second chapter where we see how immigrants
are used against each other, or against

successive later waves of immigrants,
or against the people who were here before any other people were.
I am an immigrant; it is my childhood birdhouse

across the sea the roadside camera reminds me of.
I can’t remove myself entirely from the ways
I may be used, except, perhaps,

by leaving. For where? Another shore?
When I moved, I did not think I was escaping
tentacles, but home has taken a dark turn since.

This home, too, has taken a dark turn, or rather
both have revealed themselves to have been,
all along, less safe for almost all of us.

How have I not understood that this danger—
and worse, my own danger to my neighbors—
was not historical, was not sepia-washed

postmemory, but instead was always immanent
inside a jar on my own boat, asleep in all the jars
on all the boats on all the coasts we come to seeking refuge?

Our hero is calmed and reassured and told
another story of escape. But I can’t unsee
the tail in the jar, its echo in the shapes I make

with my unknowing. The shadow in the drawing
is a real threat, un-flat,
unfurling.

Collier Nogues’s poetry collections are The Ground I Stand On Is Not My Ground (Drunken Boat, 2015) and On the Other Side, Blue (Four Way, 2011). Her work has been supported by fellowships and grants from the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, and Lingnan University. She teaches creative writing in the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s MA Program in Literary Studies, and is a PhD Fellow at the University of Hong Kong, where she studies 21st century anti-war poetry. She also edits poetry for Juked and is a contributing editor at Tongue. Visit her website for more information.