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Michael Leong



From “Disorientations”

[NOTE: “Disorientations” collages together—and so “disorients”—two postmodern Orientalist texts: Kent Johnson’s Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada, a yellowface simulation of hibakusha (atomic bomb survivor) literature, and Roland Barthes’s Empire of Signs, a semiotic treatise based on an invented system Barthes calls “Japan.”]

Here, the glow of occurrence
pieces together
     the illegible map
          and the impossible rendezvous
with the simple knowledge
that one came at all.
         This city
of forbidden domiciliation
can only be known
            by activity of an ethnographic kind:
you must orient
yourself in it
not by delighting in the distances
     of eyes
                  from identity
or      lips to
address
              but by the broken path
of becoming copious.

         It is amazing to think
what the sutra suggests
      but does not say:
orientation by printed culture
       is sustained by a banal
              and gestural practice,
all the more so
after our flesh,
      managed by  legal guide
and telephone book,
      turns opaque
with the graphic ornament of
our skins.

                  Please take off your shoes
before walking into
the terribly intense heaviness
      of pure contingency.

After caressing
the furniture
and feeling for   a fragile order
       in the flowers,
it is pleasant to study
the far-out and intelligent
      dispatch of stars
and then   to sleep
in an ancient jungle
      or a wave-washed shell
            where the smallest curve
      of abstraction is stuck at home
but always singing.








According to certain urbanists,
the major landmarks   of this sacred territory
         are underground —
            a geometric shoe stall,
            an Edo circus,
            a school  built out of
                      blossoms     and departure.

     Beneath
veined cathedrals
of leaf,
             a memory is being written
                  of prosaic substances
              crossed by golden trajectories—

like an undated news flash
      or the weeping tactility of snow
      in April.

In the central station
dedicated to commerce and transition,
there is a picture
      of pieces of a World II military train
    washed up on the beach.

The empress says
we should insert
          more functional worlds
beyond the mad insistances
of reality.
                  With long lacquer chopsticks,
she slowly moves
a fossil of a plastic dinosaur.
In its claws,
an American haiku.
         In its teeth,
the empty condoms
of the mechanical
king.



Michael Leong is a poet, critic, scholar, and educator. His most recent books include Words on Edge (Black Square Editions, 2018) and Contested Records: The Turn to Documents in Contemporary North American Poetry (University of Iowa Press, 2020). He lives in Central Ohio.



Founded in 2020, Three Fold is an independent quarterly based in Detroit that presents exploratory points of view on arts, culture, and society in addition to original works in various media, including visual art, literature, film and the performing arts. We solicit and commission contributions from artists, writers, and activists around the world. Three Fold is a publication of Trinosophes Projects, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization.

Three Fold recognizes, supports, and advocates for the sovereignty of Michigan's twelve federally-recognized Indian nations, for historic Indigenous communities in Michigan, for Indigenous individuals and communities who live here now, and for those who were forcibly removed from their Homelands. We operate on occupied territories called Waawiiyaataanong, named by the Anishinaabeg and including the Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe (Chippewa), Odawa (Ottawa), and Bodewatomi (Potawatomi) peoples. We hold to commit to Indigenous communities in Waawiiyaataanong, their elders, both past and present, and future generations.