Talan Tee: CRADLE • Cleaver Magazine

Poetry by Talan Tee
CRADLE

after J.F. Blumenbach

You once told me about sunshine / when I knew only its nameless / warmth. Blumenbach called it Mongolian, not quite / Caucasian, a brightness that persisted / like the body of the sun. Ma, in your lap / I almost dissolve, steeped in formaldehyde: the smell / of history preserving itself. Every time / I laid down, I was beside / his off-white skulls, our almost-mouths / still reciting otherness, near-perfect / mannerisms, mimicry of the specimen / of myth. I listen to / grandma, who never wanted to be / museumed, but powdered / herself down to the neck. Grandma, whose / American daughter now cradles a young boy / with stories living in his skin, chemicals / filling history textbooks with afterglow. The afterimages / of empires are called important, power / condensed between yellowing pages. My palm / catches the neon shadow of the words / I highlight, still bright as I read / my way into becoming / an exhibit plaque: at the Met, an emperor’s longpao / hanging from a rod, an 18th century silk robe / trapped under glass. You whisper / Chinese characters clouding beneath / the glass’s face: jin-huang. Yellow, golden. I catch it / flickering in the Keelung River, in the Hong Kong fight-films / we watch once dad dials up / the brightness, pupils dilating on cue. I’ve learned / to light myself from the outside in, to dress / in fluorescence, blurring the margin / between tint and white / as it vanishes into the page. All afternoon, the soft sun / flutters our curtains, as we argue over who gets to name / the afterbodies. Someone has / shown me pigment affection, how closeness / leaves its color to bleed. At story’s end, I look up / again, the light surfacing your undertone: a wavelength / daring to cross the space between / our faces, briefly / ungoverned, then subcutaneous.

Talan Tee is a Taipei-based poet born in Phoenix, Arizona. His work appears or is forthcoming in the Adroit Journal, Chestnut Review, Cleaver Magazine, and Santa Clara Review, among others, and has been recognized by the National YoungArts Foundation and the Scholastic Awards. A 2026 Djanikian Scholar in Poetry and an Anthony Quinn Scholar, he edits for Polyphony Lit and is Poetry Reader for the Adroit Journal. The editor-in-chief of Afterbodies, he is a sophomore at Taipei American School.