You deserve your beautiful life.

Its expectant icicles, the dread forest
that is not our forest.
And yet, we meet there.
The streams streaming through us.
The leaves leaving through us.

Once I was black-haired
and I sat in my country’s lap.

I was so sure she was asking me
what I wanted.

Invite at least 15 people. It’s okay if your apartment is small. Put 7 lb of cut up chicken in the biggest pot you own with 2 parts soy sauce 2 parts vinegar and 1 part water. Make sure to completely cover the chicken. Throw in a handful of black peppercorns, lots of bay leaves, and two fistfuls of garlic cloves. Bring to a rolling boil and simmer until chicken is almost falling off the bone (around 45 minutes to 1 hour.) Place chicken on a baking sheet and broil for 10 minutes until the skin is crispy and slightly charred. Boil remaining liquid for 15–20 minutes to reduce and add 1 can coconut milk to make a sauce. Plate chicken and pour sauce over. Serve with so much white rice.

So what if I don’t love you.
My problems don’t even happen to me

But to three girls grandstanding by the Potomac.
Respectively: your mother, her mother and her mother.
Three bitches in front of a trashcan.
Desirous of psychotherapy and a split lip courtesy of me.
Because I didn’t ask to be born here.
Didn’t ask to learn the language.
And don’t know how to save you.

Am I frightening you?
I’m frightening you.

Good and good and good and good.

In the last hour of night, I lean into
a book that multiplies its pages.
A settling and a continuum:
bedding down of a sedentary body
and a story of an expanding universe.
For nearly three months I’ve not walked 
out into the evening, my skin un-kissed 
by summering breeze, wafts of ghost 
fragrances of wisteria and gardenia.
                                          A virus has leapt 
into another species, and a plague roams 
the globe, locking down its best predator.
Health: spatial matter and loneliness.
                            I’m not reading the book, 
thumbing its leafing, fanning pages. 
In bed I prefer to be hostile 
and, rather, host my own 
breathing. In the distance, sirens
like a continuous Nina Simone dirge.
                           As water through granite, 
I let myself dream of an archipelago 
where I began, a scattering both
of isolation and attachment.

^{for helios, not yet a collapsed star}

and an even better
wolf, jawed to a thicket of lonely
lungs trees I mean breathing, comet
come to me, come
a lone light, like the fire
that rips the mountainside’s
dress, I was a good
ununderstood, a wrist
of bent light, undressing
alone an even quieter violence. I am
remembering how to want
my life, how to want to come
even closer to the wolf I was
you wanted this to be about borders

it is

There is no name for what rises in you 
as you enter the dim world of the taxi
and wheel through the night, escorted 
by smooth jazz and a battalion of street-
lights. At the airport, you heave the bags 
you have stuffed to the limits of carriage 
and check them in. You have no trouble 
knowing what to do with your empty 
hands. At security, the usual stripping.
You surrender your body to the scan, 
the searching sweep, as if what is dangerous 
is not what cannot be so easily detected.
You comply. At the gate, grateful to be 
early, you sit with your books, plug in 
devices that tether you to this place 
you’re meant to be leaving, that crowd 
out thoughts of arrival and its bittersweet
complications. Yuh going home or just visiting,
someone will ask, and you never know
how you will answer. You know the bones
of your mother’s brown arms will wind 
around you, her breath against your neck
will baptize you again in names you have 
no one to call you in the other place 
you belong to. You know the waiting
untended in you will surge toward her,
and you know something else will sink, 
sulk itself into a familiar, necessary sleep.
You know yourself now only as the ocean 
knows this island—always pulling away, 
always, always, returning.

From past participle of videre or to see.
The sight decided by officer.
The officer deciding by blood sugar, last blow job received, and relative
      level of disdain for vermin.
Domestic terminals do not have this railing at the exit.
As we wait for her to exit customs, our sightline is obstructed by opaque
      sliding doors, the twisting hallway behind it, the small convex mirror
      hung in the corner in which we catch shapes growing larger, into hair
      color, into gait, into age, and finally, as they turn, into kin.
The hours I’ve stood there, behind that railing.
The hours I’ve stood to savor the seconds earlier, seconds more by which
      my eye may reach the disembarking and exclaimed, “She’s here,”
      watched, from shadow to shape to gait, my imagined life come to life
      and approach, briefly, me.
My imagined life crying hot in my ear.
Ink on its fingerpads.
This will be the last I write of it directly, I say each time.
This is a light that lights everything and dimly. 
All my waiting at this railing.
All my writing is this squint.

now i like to imagine la migra running
into the sock factory where my mom
& her friends worked. it was all women

who worked there. women who braided
each other’s hair during breaks.
women who wore rosaries, & never 

had a hair out of place. women who were ready
for cameras or for God, who ended all their sentences
with si dios quiere. as in: the day before 

the immigration raid when the rumor
of a raid was passed around like bread
& the women made plans, si dios quiere.

so when the immigration officers arrived
they found boxes of socks & all the women absent.
safe at home. those officers thought

no one was working. they were wrong.
the women would say it was god working.
& it was god, but the god 

my mom taught us to fear
was vengeful. he might have wet his thumb
& wiped la migra out of this world like a smudge

on a mirror. this god was the god that woke me up
at 7am every day for school to let me know
there was food in the fridge for me & my brothers.

i never asked my mom where the food came from,
but she told me anyway: gracias a dios.
gracias a dios del chisme, who heard all la migra’s plans

& whispered them into the right ears
to keep our families safe.

One for tree, two for woods,        

                                                            I-Goo wrote the characters           

                               

                                               out for me. Dehiscent & reminiscent:

what wood made

                                               Ng Ng’s hope-chest

that she immigrated with

                                                                     —cargo from Guangzho

to Phoenix? In Spanish, Nana tells me

                                                           hope & waiting are one word.

                                        _____

In her own hand, she keeps

                                         a list of dichos—for your poems, she says.

Estan mas cerca los dientes

                      que los parentes, she recites her mother

& mother’s mother. It rhymes, she says.

                                                         

                                   Dee-say—the verb with its sound turned

down looks like dice

                                              to throw & dice, to cut. Shift after shift,

she inspected the die of integrated circuits

                                       beneath an assembly line of microscopes—            

the connections over time

                                                        getting smaller & smaller.

                                          _____

                                                                        

                                                To enter words in order to see

                                                                             —Cecilia Vicuña

In the classroom, we learn iambic words

                                          that leaf on the board with diacritics—

about, aloft, aggrieved. What over years

          accrues within one’s words? What immanent

                                                                        sprung with what rhythm?

Agave—a lie in the lion, the maenad made mad

by Dionysus awoke to find her son

                                    dead by her hand. The figure is gaslit

even if anachronistic. Data & river banks—

           memory’s figure is often riparian.  I hear Llorona’s agony

echo in the succulent. What’s the circuit in cerca to short

          or rewire the far & close—to map

                                                   Ng Ng & I-Goo to Nana’s carpool?

                                         ______

I read a sprig of evergreen, a symbol

                                               of everlasting, is sometimes packed

with a new bride’s trousseau. It was thirteen years

                                             

before Yeh Yeh could bring

                                                Ng Ng & I-Goo over. Evergreen

                     

& Empire were names of corner-stores

                                             

where they first worked—

                                             stores on corners of Nana’s barrio.

Chinito, Chinito! Toca la malaca—

                                                             she might have sung in ’49

after hearing Don Tosti’s  

                                    recording—an l where the r would be

in the Spanish rattle filled with beans or seed or as

                                                                         the song suggests

change in the laundryman’s till.

                                         ______

I have read diviners

                       use stems of yarrow when consulting

                                                                                    the I-Ching.

What happens to the woods in a maiden name?

Two hyphens make a dash—

                                                the long signal in the binary code.

                                             

Attentive antennae: a monocot

—seed to single leaf—the agave store years

                                             for the stalk. My two grandmothers:

                                                         

one’s name keeps a pasture,

                       the other a forest. If they spoke to one another,

                     

it was with short, forced words

                                    like first strokes when sawing—

                                             

                                              trying to set the teeth into the grain.

I ask the new migrant if he regrets leaving Russia.

We have dispensed already with my ancestry.

He says no. For a time, he was depressed. He found

with every return he missed what he left behind.

A constant state of this. Better to love by far

where you are. He taps the steering wheel of his car,

the hum of the engine an imperceptible tremble

in us. When he isn’t driving, he works tending

to new trees. I’ve seen these saplings popping

up all over the suburbs, tickling the bellies

of bridges, the new rooted darlings of the State.

The council spent a quarter mil on them &

someone, he—Lilian—must ensure the dirt

holds. Gentrification is climate-friendly now.

I laugh and he laughs, and we eat the distance

between histories. He checks on his buds daily.

Are they okay? They are okay. They do not need

him, but he speaks, and they listen or at least

shake a leaf. What a world where you can live off

land by loving it. If only we cared for each other

this way. The council cares for their investment.

The late greenery, that is, not Lilian, who shares

his ride on the side. I wonder what it would cost 

to have men be tender to me regularly, 

to be folded into his burly, to be left on the side

of the road as he drove away, exhausted. Even

my dreams of tenderness involve being used

& I’m not sure who to blame: colonialism,

capitalism, patriarchy, queerness or poetry?

Sorry, this is a commercial for the Kia Sportage

now. This is a commercial for Lilian’s thighs.

He didn’t ask for this and neither did I—how

language drapes us together, how stories tongue

each other in the back seat and the sky blurs

out of frame. There are too many agonies

to discuss here, and I am nearly returned.

He has taken me all the way back, around

the future flowering, back to where I am not,

to the homes I keep investing in as harms.

I should fill them with trees. Let the boughs

cover the remembered boy, cowering

under a mother, her raised weapon

not the cane but the shattering within,

let the green tear through the wall

paper, let life replace memory. Lilian, I left

you that day, and in the leaving, a love

followed. Isn’t that a wonder and a wound?

Tell me which it is, I confess I mistake the two.

I walk up the stairs to my old brick apartment

where the peach tree reaches for the railing,

a few blushing fruits poking through the bars,

eager to brush my leg, to say linger, halt.

I want to stop, to hold it for real, just once

but I must wait until I am safe.

a young woman came in
speaking Arabic  I said are you Iraqi
she said I haven’t eaten  for three days
I said what do you mean  she said
I need to turn  turn myself in
this was a strange language to me
a different logic  Come and sit I said
food brought out  she ate  finally
spoke  her husband now in Istanbul
they’d escaped Iraq  he was taxi driver
sold his car paid $5,000 to Turkish driver
to send her  Istanbul to Amsterdam
a big truck  crates of fruit and vegetables
had a tiny space           in the middle  kept her
there  gave her food and water supposed to last
seven days  lasted four  strange language
mouth of the truck  she was stuck
in one position for seven days  could not
move  crates of figs  pallets cracked
blocked  lodged  then they just dropped her
in the middle of Amsterdam right then  she was
hoping waiting  turn myself in  my husband not
far behind  strange language to me  I did not
understand  turn myself in  in the middle
of Amsterdam do you speak    speak

That a potholed street in the middling borough of Collingswood, New Jersey, bears the name Atlantic, after an all-consuming body of water.

That all-consuming is Atlas’ curse to bear the heavens on his shoulders.

That after the fall of the gods, half of the heavens is darkness.

That inside the car speeding down the street, I believe I am safe from being halved.

That “I” am not a white box, but a body of water.

That white is a pattern of boys who expect to live long enough to become men.

That some of these boys are whistling by on their bikes, and behind them, clear as a dream, welcome candles in the windows framed by blooms of vervain.

That “welcome” means I thought I was not afraid of the dark.

Since the jade scrubs of the cancer ward.

Since the florescent grid of the factory and the vista of small bones in my father’s collar while I was interpreting for the twenty-something-year-old white citizen,

                              “Tell your dad he can quit or I can fire him.”

Grief had already burst its cocoon; it ate him like an army of moths from the inside.

That brown men and women kept stitching jackets under the heavens of the machines.

Welcome.

That a moth is trapped in the car with me – it will die, but I do not want to practice florescence alone.

Like a first language bleeding hearts call, speaking truth to power.

I don’t know how they don’t know that power doesn’t care.

That watching fires go out will become a pattern.

That fire is everywhere, and therefore, cheap.

That the hole in my foundation is all-consuming and at its bottom a frangipani tree opens its yellow hands.

That POLICE ICE is printed in yellow or white on the jacket of the night.

That the night walks freely among the ranks of the sun.

That a body of water parted once like a red skirt then sealed over the armored horses of Egypt.

That Whitney Houston is a bone blasting

out the car windows.

That tonight, the night after, the night after that, for as long as the distance between god and a pothole, a moth’s flight will spell,

                                        “They are coming for you.”

In Greek, amphibian means 
“on both sides of life.”

As in: amphibians live 
on land and in water.

As in: immigrants leave 
lands and cross waters.

While amphibians lay 
shell-less eggs,

immigrants give birth 
to Americans.

In water, gilled tadpoles 
sprout limbs. On land

amphibians develop lungs.
Immigrants develop lungs.

Breathe in pine, fuel
and cold atmosphere.

Amphibians’ damp
skin oxygenates. 

Immigrants toil 
and slumber deathly.

Their colors brighten.
They camouflage.

They’ve been known to fall 
out of the sky.

Completely at home
in the rain.