Apartment B:

Block B:

My best friend’s house was haunted, and so was mine.

From our balconies we could reach out and brush each other

with the flickering arms of flashlights,

so maybe it was the same ghost.

It skittered under the yellowing wallpaper,

wilting the ghastly printed bouquets, and

effused a soul sucking despair, a whole-body icy water tingle

that manifested in the spitting static of the flickering T.V.

It hid in the corners unprotected by her mother’s Buddhist charms,

and in my mother’s morgue of moulding pantsuits 

and Chanel coats threatening to burst from their bags in the gloom. 

It flitted in and out of our father’s suits: lingering, 

like the perfume of their mistresses,

burying itself in the furious silences, 

the averted eyes and the cold family dinners. 

My best friend was the sort who would pretend she didn’t see anything;

not the door to my mother’s bedroom unlatch itself,

creep open of its own accord, and then swing tersely shut,

nor our mothers wiping tears and smudged mascara from their cheeks. 

But she wasn’t there to pretend she didn’t see

the lone pigeon smash head first into the balcony sliding door,

red dribbling down the glass while I saw it writhe and convulse. 

Neither of us were there to see what made 

both of my hamsters turn up dead.

At the same time, it had to be a coincidence. 

My nanny blamed the heat.

We never speak of the night her sister’s friends came over

and disappeared to her mother’s bathroom, only to run out screaming

that they’d seen an old man in there, in rice-paper pajamas,

but her grandparents were watching their cantonese dramas 

on the discolored denim couches beside us that watched, 

with baleful cushion-eyes, a family fall apart.  

And no one else was home. 

Just as we never speak of the night her father shattered a vase

and twisted his ankle chasing her mother through the kitchen,  

Or the night my father packed his things 

at three in the morning,  on a school night, to save his affair, 

While I cried in my mother’s bed holding my book about aliens and ants. 

Even after we both bade goodbye to our apartments and their apparitions,

and our childhood taboos festered into adolescent bitterness spat off barbed tongues 

at the absentee fathers and worn away mothers we swore we’d never be like,

we never forgot the valley that had cupped our homes and secrets and ghosts, 

the land where our pretty white buildings stood gorged in discord,

the sunken pit that also held all the bodies of the locals 

that the Japanese dismembered,

disemboweled and desecrated 

during the war.