In the invitation, I tell them for the seventeenth time
(the fourth in writing), that I am gay.

In the invitation, I include a picture of my boyfriend
& write, You’ve met him two times. But this time,

you will ask him things other than can you pass the
whatever. You will ask him

about him. You will enjoy dinner. You will be
enjoyable. Please RSVP.

They RSVP. They come.
They sit at the table & ask my boyfriend

the first of the conversation starters I slip them
upon arrival: How is work going?

I’m like the kid in Home Alone, orchestrating
every movement of a proper family, as if a pair

of scary yet deeply incompetent burglars
is watching from the outside.

My boyfriend responds in his chipper way.
I pass my father a bowl of fish ball soup—So comforting,

isn’t it? My mother smiles her best
Sitting with Her Son’s Boyfriend

Who Is a Boy Smile. I smile my Hurray for Doing
a Little Better Smile.

Everyone eats soup.
Then, my mother turns

to me, whispers in Mandarin, Is he coming with you
for Thanksgiving? My good friend is & she wouldn’t like

this. I’m like the kid in Home Alone, pulling
on the string that makes my cardboard mother

more motherly, except she is
not cardboard, she is

already, exceedingly my mother. Waiting
for my answer.

While my father opens up
a Boston Globe, when the invitation

clearly stated: No security
blankets. I’m like the kid

in Home Alone, except the home
is my apartment, & I’m much older, & not alone,

& not the one who needs
to learn, has to—Remind me

what’s in that recipe again, my boyfriend says
to my mother, as though they have always, easily

talked. As though no one has told him
many times, what a nonlinear slapstick meets

slasher flick meets psychological
pit he is now co-starring in.

Remind me, he says
to our family.

I wake up in your bed. I know I have been dreaming.
Much earlier, the alarm broke us from each other,
you’ve been at your desk for hours. I know what I dreamed:
our friend the poet comes into my room
where I’ve been writing for days,
drafts, carbons, poems are scattered everywhere,
and I want to show her one poem
which is the poem of my life. But I hesitate,
and wake. You’ve kissed my hair
to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem,
I say, a poem I wanted to show someone . . .
and I laugh and fall dreaming again
of the desire to show you to everyone I love,
to move openly together
in the pull of gravity, which is not simple,
which carries the feathered grass a long way down the upbreathing air.

A bird, a bee, a sycamore tree,

I’ve never been as strong
as anyone thinks—there were times
when, of course, I cried—at movies
mostly, at television shows, those fictive

lion’s ribs and honey,

releases, built to house feeling
so it is shameless. I am
shameless as in I've run out of it.
I always pictured Delilah as a man—

combs alchemized to a gold

men tempt me—
and I understood Samson as a fiction—
unconvinced of masculinity—
so I felt him, I felt him as Delilah did.

lung, unbreathing, sweet.

I know I’m godless when

my thirst converts water                into wasps, my country a carpet

                                                            I finger for crumbs. A country

my grandmother breeds

dogs instead of daughters             because only one can be called

                                                            home. I am trained to lose accents,

to keep a pregnancy

or cancel it out with                       another man. My tongue is

                                                            a twin, one translating

the other’s silence. Here

is my lung’s list of needs:               how to hold water

                                                            like a woman & not

drown. I want men

to stop writing &                            become mothers. I promise this

                                                            is the last time I call my mother

to hear her voice

beside mine. I want                        the privilege of a history

                                                            to hand back unworn

to grow out of

my mother’s touch                         like a dress from

                                                            childhood. Every time

I flirt with girls, I say

I know my way around                   a wound. I say let’s bang

                                                            open like doors, answer to

god. I unpin from

my skin, leave it to                          age in my closet & swing

                                                            from the dark, a wrecking

ball gown. In the closet

urns of ashes:                                   we cremated my grandfather

                                                            on a stovetop, stirred

every nation we tried

to bury him in was                          a war past calling itself

                                                            one. I stay closeted with

him, his scent echoing

in the urn, weeks-old                     ginger & leeks, leaks

                                                            of light where his bones halved

& healed. With small

hands, I puzzled                              him back together. I hid from

                                                            his shadow in closets

his feet like a chicken’s,

jellied bone & meatless.                His favorite food was chicken

                                                            feet, bones shallow in the meat

When he got dementia,

he flirted with my mother              he mouthed for my breasts

                                                            like an infant

We poured milk

into his eyeholes                             until he saw everything

                                                            neck-deep in white

the Chinese color

of mourning, bad                             luck, though the doctor

                                                            says everything is

genetics. I lock myself in

the smallest rooms that fit             in my mind, my grandfather’s:

                                                            a house we hired back from

fire. So I’ll forever

have a mother, I become                a daughter who goes by god. I urn

                                                            my ghosts, know each by a name

my own.