Cassandra Hsiao

Ode to the Nightmarket

you are the arch nemesis of silence
armed with arguments over pricing
twelve ringgits and mai yi, song yi.
you lift pop­up canopy tents
and listen to dialects as they wrap
a twine necklace around your lips.
your native tongue takes flight.

every night, you hum an electric blue,
an orange­peel moon in your dusky hair
no stars tonight.
you expand into spaces
next to the display of Dragon Eyes fruits
you could fit a child’s silhouette
but not their shadow.
someone takes refuge there now,
to evade the smell of durians
her father—your father—is selling.
he is engaged in a bargaining battle
with a pair of fierce eyes and a sharp tongue.

you never go to sleep.
your irises reflect tinted light
from paper lanterns that cast
pink and blue hues on the woman
selling chicken sizzling in a pot of oil,
covered in flakes of gold.
she switches between Bahasa Malay
and broken English that you taught her.

you hand out samples of fingernail­sized dried fish
with invisible scales and crunchy skeletons
your forehead is sticky with sweat
and pieces of sugar art,
spider webbing lines of sucrose
what once used to shape a panda on a stick.

a young boy buys a secondhand small rug
you knitted yourself. you threaded
your favorite triangle­square pattern
he runs his fingers through a forest
of sunset red threads that cling to his blisters.



--
Cassandra Hsiao is a junior in the Creative Writing conservatory at the Orange County School of the Arts. She is an editor of her school’s award winning art and literary magazine, Inkblot, and has been nationally recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. Cassandra is also a teen reporter for three online outlets and a journalist for the Los Angeles’ Times High School
Insider. ­