Diffraction spikes

In Xintiandi’s rumchuckle sun
peals of laughter garnish the afternoon’s glassy rim,
and suddenly he says: I have a student just like you,
meaning one who is wrong-handed, rounded off
to the nearest seven digits. Every awkward handshake’s
knuckles judder down my spine like thin sticks
across thick-skinned and frog-shaped güiros. I relive
the moment an American yachtswoman seized my arm
by its non-existent bicep at a riverside market.
She was part retiree, part human chandelier. Please,
she entreated, my husband just has to meet you.
He emerged white-teeth-first from the lens flare of a stall
selling parlour clocks made from blank CDs.
He had no name for us. We shook left hands and he said
disability is no barrier to success, but that he learned
the hard way which wrist should wear the Rolex.

We’ve spent the afternoon at a communist museum
where they kettled us through like pilgrims in Tawaf
past floral arrangements and monolithic vicissitudes
and out once more into Shanghai Fashion Week
where we have begun to drink with expatriate verve,
where words clink like ice cubes muddling the menthol
from a sprig of Chinese mint. Just like you.

I remember the story of a seven-foot turbaned man
lurching from a crowd, beaming. In my mind
kind strangers always materialise from a starburst.
He is going to be fine. Yes, this was the medical consensus.
I have a brother just like him. I remember an afterimage
of the Sikh doused in window-light, each retelling
skewered through with diffraction spikes of toffee glass.
How I imagined him pinched back into the glare,
one hand hidden behind the other behind his back.

The most surreal thing about a rare condition is the revelation
mid-life that it has a name. It’s called Poland Syndrome,
my brother says. We’re crossing eight lanes of traffic
towards the sunset, its vivid spears levelled low.
Why Poland? I picture sepia-toned villagers
with concavities of chest and undercooked grips
sheltering from a super-cell chemical meltdown.

No use telling the baritone beggar who serenades
the street-swept streets with a Sanyo microphone
held between the artichoke stems of hands taken
by gangsters or government officials that disability
is no barrier to success, I think. But had he been a boy
(like I was), and had the moment seemed sun-dipped
in the weirdness of the real as we passed his mat,
it would have been my time to say that ideas can feel
just like little fingerlings. That our privilege
is to be able to count on one hand all the ways

we are incomplete.