from In What Way Does the Room Map Out Violence? (audio only)
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Becoming Ghost
I stand behind a one-way mirror. My father sits in a room interrogating himself. Bright bulb shining like the idea of a daughter. — It looked just like the real thing. The helicopters, the fields, the smoke which rose in colors, the bullets blank, but too real. Coppola yells Action and we drag slowly across the back of the screen, miniature prisoners of war to Robert Duvall’s broad, naked chest. What you’ll never see written into the credits are our names. — Ghost of a daughter: specter, spectator, from a future we can only dream of.
2018
Los Angeles, Manila, Đà Nẵng
California drought withering the basins,
the hills ready to ignite. Oh, stupid ways
I’ve loved and unraveled myself.
I, a parched field, and not a spit of rain.
I announced to a room of strangers,
I’ve never loved anyone more.
Now he and I no longer speak.
Outside: Manila, 40 years
after my parents’ first arrival.
I deplane where they debarked.
At customs, I am given a sheet warning of MERS—
in ’75, my parents received fishermen’s lunches,
a bottle of fish sauce. They couldn’t enter
2016
Pomegranate (audio only)
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2014