What Are You: Bridge
America is just another word for star being born. Little densities squeezed together under just enough pressure, the collapse of other worlds fusing. We think everything revolves around our empire, no, we are just new. When the old regime closed in on itself, they took a boat to get here. My Vietnamese friend told me in 8-year-old whispers that her mom had surgery to make eyelids. Tiny little things, puffs of cloud broken off into new space. My ya-ya’s beard was rumored to be red, remnants from colonial rape. The family tree stops there. On the other side, we fought in the Civil War, have a flag to prove it. My ex-boyfriend’s father told him to date whomever you want but marry a Jewish girl. On his death bed, his dying wish. That’s when that star died and formed gas clouds in my chest. My white grandma never cooked anything but macaroni and yelled at the TV for them all to go back where they came from. After everything they lost, my parents lost us in the divorce. California is a nebula. I know some white girls who choose to get screamed at for their black men by old stars still dying. Love is a symbol, mixed up as it is with the evolution of everything else. One thing I never needed to be taught was how to feel celestial. There is a lightness to not having a family. I draw down bridges wherever I go.
Reflection: Crossing Worlds
cold snap of bone, the pig’s leg breaks
rice steams over pork belly, hissing
I didn’t grow up near a river
but I know the silence of leaves
coal stoves heat scraps under straw roofs
cold migration to suicide factories
I see a bride in wooden sandals
a poet missing her in the forest
a great wall built by slave hands
and a child beaten by the fire
for crying too loudly, shush
there is always a war outside
that someone is protesting
a tank in a village, the emperor’s robes
and loud-mouthed innocence
almond eyes unblinking in the glass
[…] Daily), Terry Wolverton (Cultural Weekly/Daily), Nancy Lyneé Woo (Oxford Magazine, Kosmos, Sweet Lit), Gail Wronsky (Air/Light), Désirée Zamarano […]