after Joanna Ng

In the dream, I am reincarnated as a cowboy, wide-brimmed stetson dangling low over my copper face. I walk to the saloon on main street–aimlessly as actions in dreams often are–a shadowed figure eroded by dust and a lone streetlight. In a town as static as broken radio dials, no one recognizes my foreign face–the flat hollow of my cheek, the fish-scale of my eye. Dripping saline, gasping in unfamiliar soil. I moved out West for promises of gold, an origin story beginning with my mother and ending with an exit wound. Her voice echoes across the mountain: They don’t want people like us there. Yet I ran anyway toward the horizon, morphing into memory for the only woman who ever loved me. When I reached California, the only gold I found was the cheap glint of my skin, the corroded rust of pennies. Now, I am alone in this town, choking on the spit of my own thirst. In the saloon, a white man with eyes like the sea laughs over two bottles of whiskey, his muscles taut, neck angled backwards like a shot from a film. The next Hollywood star. Women fan themselves in the background, admiring the chainsaw-ridge of his jaw. Meanwhile, I am just an extra on set, blurred quietly in the background. Dissolved into half-body. For a second, I imagine how it feels to inhabit a body people desire like gold. Poster of masculinity, mythologized in movies and colognes and statues. A face remembered by history. But I am not a real cowboy, beneath the belt and the boots. I kneel down to lick the sap of yuccas, the only trace of sweetness for miles. The pistol I travel with is my lone companion. Her touch like the sun on my thigh is warm, and I cherish her metal skin like a lover. At night, I sleep under the black dirt of shanty camps, whisper to the wind. Mother, let us suffer together instead of apart. I was foolish, I am just a boy. Forget horses thundering under my palms, lassos roped across a vast uncharted earth, everything mine to conquer. All I want is to hold and be held, some small proof of my existence. Last week, I saw my mother again, her face watery under a withered desert sun. She held out a bar of gold, but it was her hand I sought instead. What a relief, that brief, unburdened tenderness. It must have been a dream, but who can remember dreams. Maybe in another life, a different timeline, I’ll be the conqueror, not the shadow it leaves behind. Taste gold instead of the damp muck of silt. But for now, I must learn to bear this bitterness under my tongue. For now, I step one foot out of the saloon’s double-swinging door and into stiff dusk air.