Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth!
Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,
Giving me strength erect against her hate.
Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.
Yet as a rebel fronts a king in state,
I stand within her walls with not a shred
Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer.
Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,
And see her might and granite wonders there,
Beneath the touch of Time’s unerring hand,
Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.

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.

(We are the lines we won’t cross)

Who hasn’t given up their seat to a man who says
he can’t stand to sit with his back to the door.
Who hasn’t waited, preoccupied with the thoughts of escaping
this or that war, or sweatshop, or relationship,

(To be Asian American is to be told what you deserve)

by now learning that almost all stories in life end in some type of heartbreak—
exhausted, turning your back:
and in so doing, making you vulnerable
to the combustion that is human interaction.

(Every human being alive and dead is a cautionary tale)

Before this there never was a before this, 
but if you don’t know:
many years I’ve taught myself to walk between my child,
any railing they could be tossed over,
put myself between them and, say, train tracks,
knowing others see us as moving targets in a steamed jungle 
the way my parents did for me.

(Already so many ghosts)

To be an Asian body in America is to belong nowhere.
And what people cannot hold, they push.

What if
instead of being the opposite of a trust exercise
we were made sails
our purpose: to turn our backs 
to a wind we can’t see.

A shipping container of rubber duckies made in China for the US washed overboard in 1992, and some of them traveled and washed ashore over 17,000 miles over 15 years.
 
Let’s go ahead and assume it’s yellow.
What little of science I know:
its plastic skin invincible against salt water,
but not the sun–
we can only ask so much.
Will it fade or brown?
What I mean to say is
I would want one of these
for my daughter:
its internal clock set to the mercy of the currents
that have been predictable for centuries,
but mercy is not the word anyone
would choose.
Sometimes not making sense and floating
are the same.
Each wave is its own beginning and ending.
Through international waters,
you could have caused an incident:
no one knowing you,
never reaching the hands that hoped for you.
Rough immigrant, or
free refugee–
floating flagless,
fading border,
stamped with words but not your name.

Because my mouth 

Is wide with laughter

And my throat

Is deep with song,

You do not think 

I suffer after 

I have held my pain 

So long. 



Because my mouth 

Is wide with laughter, 

You do not hear

My inner cry, 

Because my feet 

Are gay with dancing, 

You do not know 

I die. 

I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
     flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
     went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy
     bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

is up The Met’s stone steps,
so many that I have trouble collecting 
my girthy tourist’s breaths

and my palms, all sweaty, 
smeared with ink 
from his crinkled face,

wrinkled in the brochure, and
to think I’m too underdressed 
for a pocket square,

so up goes the tee’s hem
to blot my forehead dry
enough, when, of course,

there goes my furry gut’s apron
for everyone to see 
it unfurling like the carpet

Claudia Schiffer stomped
toward that one Lagerfeld photoshoot:
her mean mien

of a pouty puss made up 
to an almost-
black face, blond braided back

under a theoretical afro, 
an aphrodisiac, you know, 
what men want, a diasporic taste

in their ladies: hot 
enough to boil a stew pot, thin 
as ladle handles, good cooks

in the bedroom—yet 
still Lagerfeld wanted
supremacy’s payload, to not see

that which was too colored 
for his pleathered hands to hold 
not but to plunder, and so here we are

staring up at his sketched waifs,
craning our necks
to take in the niched wall,

each gown an upturned urn
shelved in its own alcove, 
dressed in nothing

but archive’s bleached light, 
the mannequins’ clean faces 
looking down on us—

crowded together 
like the staggered heads 
of snaggleteeth 
in his stitched mouth.

When the pickup truck, with its side mirror, 
almost took out my arm, the driver’s grin

reflected back; it was just a horror

show that was never going to happen, 
don’t protest, don’t bother with the police

for my benefit, he gave me a smile—

he too was startled, redness in his face— 
when I thought I was going, a short while,

to get myself killed: it wasn’t anger

when he bared his teeth, as if to caution 
calm down, all good, no one died, ni[ght, neighbor]—

no sense getting all pissed, the commotion

of the past is the past; I was so dim, 
he never saw me—of course, I saw him.

After a century, humpbacks migrate
again to Queens. They left
due to sewage and white froth

banking the shores from polychlorinated-
biphenyl-dumping into the Hudson
and winnowing menhaden schools.

But now grace, dark bodies of song
return. Go to the seaside—

Hold your breath. Submerge.
A black fluke silhouetted
against the Manhattan skyline.

Now ICE beats doors
down on Liberty Avenue
to deport. I sit alone on orange

A train seats, mouth sparkling
from Singh’s, no matter how
white supremacy gathers

at the sidewalks, flows down
the streets, we still beat our drums
wild. Watch their false-god statues

prostrate to black and brown hands.
They won’t keep us out
though they send us back.

Our songs will pierce the dark
fathoms. Behold the miracle:

what was once lost
now leaps before you.

To fling my arms wide
In some place of the sun,
To whirl and to dance
Till the white day is done.
Then rest at cool evening
Beneath a tall tree
While night comes on gently,
    Dark like me—
That is my dream!

To fling my arms wide
In the face of the sun,
Dance! Whirl! Whirl!
Till the quick day is done.
Rest at pale evening . . .
A tall, slim tree . . .
Night coming tenderly
    Black like me.

The instructor said,

    Go home and write
    a page tonight.
    And let that page come out of you—
    Then, it will be true.

I wonder if it's that simple?
I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem.
I went to school there, then Durham, then here
to this college on the hill above Harlem.
I am the only colored student in my class.
The steps from the hill lead down into Harlem,
through a park, then I cross St. Nicholas,
Eighth Avenue, Seventh, and I come to the Y,
the Harlem Branch Y, where I take the elevator
up to my room, sit down, and write this page:

It's not easy to know what is true for you or me
at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I'm what
I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you:
hear you, hear me—we two—you, me, talk on this page.
(I hear New York, too.) Me—who?
Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.
I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.
I like a pipe for a Christmas present,
or records—Bessie, bop, or Bach.
I guess being colored doesn't make me not like
the same things other folks like who are other races.
So will my page be colored that I write?

Being me, it will not be white.
But it will be
a part of you, instructor.
You are white—
yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.
That's American.
Sometimes perhaps you don't want to be a part of me.
Nor do I often want to be a part of you.
But we are, that's true!
As I learn from you,
I guess you learn from me—
although you're older—and white—
and somewhat more free.

This is my page for English B.