from Chinatowns

Kim Cheng Boey

Over and over you study the menus, the recipes, the difficult names

of herbs and roots, the cures that awaken a forgotten hunger.

You scour these Chinatowns of the mind, translating them

like sutras Xuan Zang fetched from India, testing ways

return might be possible against these homesick inventions,

trace the traveller’s alien steps across borders, and in between

discover how transit has a way of lasting, the way these Chinatowns

grew out of not knowing to return or to stay, and then became home.