Ink Knows No Borders
Page 5
and bowed her head to prayers she couldn’t understand.
Hieu Minh Nguyen
Pronounced
You excavate anything that has tried to lodge itself
in your body without permission. You bury the toothbrush
against your right molar and scrape and scrape whatever
you find. Loss makes you feel all the other losses.
Eleven years later when you no longer eat pizza
or speak Spanish, when your father’s silhouette invades
your clenched jawline, you borrow his brisk gait,
his snort, his face. People say you look white.
Your father never does. The restaurant won’t seat
you. The hostess says neither of you meet dress
code (your father wearing a double-breasted suit).
You are a man trying to roll your r’s. Where did
they go? You are still trying to excavate the sounds
you once dreamt in. You hardly remember your mother
tongue. You are trying to pull something useable from
the wreckage. It all feels familiar. Your best friend
compliments your clean pronunciation. The way you have
learned to let go of everything you once called home.
Carlos Andrés Gómez
Off-Island Chamorros
My family migrated to California when I was 15 years old.
During the first day at my new high school, the homeroom
teacher asked me where I was from. “The Mariana Islands,”
I answered. He replied: “I’ve never heard of that place.
Prove it exists.” And when I stepped in front of the world map
on the wall, it transformed into a mirror: the Pacific Ocean,
like my body, was split in two and flayed to the margins. I
found Australia, then the Philippines, then Japan. I pointed
to an empty space between them and said: “I’m from this
invisible archipelago.” Everyone laughed. And even though
I descend from oceanic navigators, I felt so lost, shipwrecked
on the coast of a strange continent. “Are you a citizen?”
he probed. “Yes. My island, Guam, is a U.S. territory.”
We attend American schools, eat American food, listen
to American music, watch American movies and television,
play American sports, learn American history, dream
American dreams, and die in American wars. “You
speak English well,” he proclaimed, “with almost no
accent.” And isn’t that what it means to be a diasporic
Chamorro: to feel foreign in a domestic sense.
Over the last 50 years, Chamorros have migrated to
escape the violent memories of war; to seek jobs, schools,
hospitals, adventure, and love; but most of all, we’ve migrated
for military service, deployed and stationed to bases around
the world. According to the 2010 census, 44,000 Chamorros
live in California, 15,000 in Washington, 10,000 in Texas,
7,000 in Hawaii, and 70,000 more in every other state
and even Puerto Rico. We are the most “geographically
dispersed” Pacific Islander population within the United
States, and off-island Chamorros now outnumber
our on-island kin, with generations having been born
away from our ancestral homelands, including my daughter.
Some of us will be able to return home for holidays, weddings,
and funerals; others won’t be able to afford the expensive plane
ticket to the Western Pacific. Years and even decades might pass
between trips, and each visit will feel too short. We’ll lose contact
with family and friends, and the island will continue to change
until it becomes unfamiliar to us. And isn’t that, too, what it means
to be a diasporic Chamorro: to feel foreign in your own homeland.
And there’ll be times when we’ll feel adrift, without itinerary
or destination. We’ll wonder: What if we stayed? What if we return?
When the undertow of these questions begins pulling you
out to sea, remember: migration flows through our blood
like the aerial roots of i trongkon nunu. Remember: our ancestors
taught us how to carry our culture in the canoes of our bodies.
Remember: our people, scattered like stars, form new constellations
when we gather. Remember: home is not simply a house,
village, or island; home is an archipelago of belonging.
Craig Santos Perez
A New National Anthem
The truth is, I’ve never cared for the National
Anthem. If you think about it, it’s not a good
song. Too high for most of us with “the rockets’
red glare” and then there are the bombs.
(Always, always there is war and bombs.)
Once, I sang it at homecoming and threw
even the tenacious high school band off key.
But the song didn’t mean anything, just a call
to the field, something to get through before
the pummeling of youth. And what of the stanzas
we never sing, the third that mentions “no refuge
could save the hireling and the slave”? Perhaps
the truth is every song of this country
has an unsung third stanza, something brutal
snaking underneath us as we blindly sing
the high notes with a beer sloshing in the stands
hoping our team wins. Don’t get me wrong, I do
like the flag, how it undulates in the wind
like water, elemental, and best when it’s humbled,
brought to its knees, clung to by someone who
has lost everything, when it’s not a weapon,
when it flickers, when it folds up so perfectly
you can keep it until it’s needed, until you can
love it again, until the song in your mouth feels
like sustenance, a song where the notes are sung
by even the ageless woods, the shortgrass plains,
the Red River Gorge, the fistful of land left
unpoisoned, that song that’s our birthright,
that’s sung in silence when it’s too hard to go on,
that sounds like someone’s rough fingers weaving
into another’s, that sounds like a match being lit
in an endless cave, the song that says my bones
are your bones, and your bones are my bones,
and isn’t that enough?
Ada Limón
Portrait of Isako in Wartime
Ohio, and I imagine her
walking the train line
tracks narrowed in the distance.
Through her soles,
the platform’s slats. She feels
their unevenness
in the flats of her feet. Noon-
day heat and the wool
of her jacket’s itchy.
She’s got a bob, it’s 1943
and the war’s on. No one
in the station looks
like her, but everyone’s
looking at her.
No explanation but the one
in government-issued print.
National Student Relocation
Council. Early Release.
The sentry in his watch-
tower, barbed-wire fence
and Stars and Stripes flapping
in the wind. From across
the tracks, a man (here,
imagination does the work
history’s lost) approaches, finger
bared, a blunt accusation.
Aren’t you a Jap? The long
explanation—why she’s out,
whose s
ide she’s on.
The nations we pledge
at odds, leaving us to make
up the difference.
This story’s old, the woman
—dead, papers boxed
in a back closet. I’ve seen them.
Early Release.
The government-issued ID number.
In camp, it’s said, they cut
gardens into Arkansas desert,
fixed rocks into the flat face
of the earth and irrigated
bean rows to feed their families.
Healthy vines appeared
where none should have
grown; tiny buds coaxed
from the earth, tendrils
that spooled runners
through dust.
When the order came
to pack up and return
home, the authorities found
every curtain drawn
shut. Every barrack
floor swept clean.
Mia Ayumi Malhotra
Domesticity
In Chinese, the word country is half
the word home: 家. Written before a name,
家 also means domesticized, as in daughter
whittling her ribs into toothpicks.
Daughter breaking clean
as a bowl. I grow full on
steam. I eat through all my leashes, swallow
a sky twice my size. I gather rust
between my fingers, my girlhood
grown out of. In this country, I choose
between living like an animal or dying
like one. Be the tongueless dog or the hunger
it was rescued from. There is nothing alive
about me. I prove it with a passport
photo of my birth: my mother unknotting
me from a length of rope. Someday
a child will slip out of my body
like a neck from a noose. Motherhood
an attempt at my own life. I envy birds
who fly domestic, their bodies
native to the same sky. Our wings
are alien, attached backwards, angled
wounds. Instead of flight, we learned
butchery. How best to eat from
our injuries. We blow on our cuts
like cooling soup. Serve me
in a corset, a country waisting me
so thin I double as a blade. My birth
certificate an x-ray. The doctor
counts my bones, naming each
a way he can break me. There is nothing
meat about me. I am all joint, all
hinge. My body opens
no doors. To enter a country, leave
me behind. Water your garden
with gunshot. What grows is a woman
stemless, seedless. I am always ready
for bite, for arrow. I am always ready
to run. How else does an animal
learn distance
as dying. How else do I
learn home
is my hunter.
Kristin Chang
The Poet at Fifteen
after Larry Levis
You wear faded black
and paint your face white as the blessed
teeth of Jesus
because brown isn’t high art
unless you are a beautiful savage.
All the useless tautologies—
This is me. I am this. I am me.
In your ragged
Salvation Army sweaters, in your brilliant
awkwardness. White dresses
like Emily Dickinson.
I dreaded that first Robin,
so, at fifteen you slash
your wrists.
You’re not allowed
to shave your legs in the hospital.
The atmosphere
that year: sometimes you exist
and sometimes you think you’re Mrs. Dalloway.
This is bold—existing.
You do not understand your parents
who understand you less:
your father who listens to ABBA after work,
your mother who eats expired food.
How do you explain what you have done?
With your hybrid mouth, a split tongue.
How do you explain the warmth
sucking you open, leaving you
like a gutted machine?
It is a luxury to tell a story.
How do you explain
that the words are made by more
than your wanting?
Te chingas o te jodes.
At times when you speak Spanish, your tongue
is flaccid inside your rotten mouth:
disgraciada, sin vergüenza.
At the hospital they’re calling your name
with an accent on the E. They bring you
tacos, a tiny golden crucifix.
Your father has run
all the way from the factory.
Erika L. Sánchez
Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong
Ocean, don’t be afraid.
The end of the road is so far ahead
it is already behind us.
Don’t worry. Your father is only your father
until one of you forgets. Like how the spine
won’t remember its wings
no matter how many times our knees
kiss the pavement. Ocean,
are you listening? The most beautiful part
of your body is wherever
your mother’s shadow falls.
Here’s the house with childhood
whittled down to a single red trip wire.
Don’t worry. Just call it horizon
& you’ll never reach it.
Here’s today. Jump. I promise it’s not
a lifeboat. Here’s the man
whose arms are wide enough to gather
your leaving. & here the moment,
just after the lights go out, when you can still see
the faint torch between his legs.
How you use it again & again
to find your own hands.
You asked for a second chance
& are given a mouth to empty out of.
Don’t be afraid, the gunfire
is only the sound of people
trying to live a little longer
& failing. Ocean. Ocean—
get up. The most beautiful part of your body
is where it’s headed. & remember,
loneliness is still time spent
with the world. Here’s
the room with everyone in it.
Your dead friends passing
through you like wind
through a wind chime. Here’s a desk
with the gimp leg & a brick
to make it last. Yes, here’s a room
so warm & blood-close,
I swear, you will wake—
& mistake these walls
for skin.
Ocean Vuong
ode to the first white girl i ever loved
it was kindergarten
& i did not know english
so i could not talk
without being ridiculed
& the teacher did not want me in her class
she was white, too
she said i do not know
how to teach someone
who only speaks spanish
& the kids did not want me in their class
they were white, too
they said we do not know
how to be friends with someone
who only speaks spanish
& i was the only Mexican
& i only spoke spanish
i watched a lot of tv
& everyone was rich & white
my family was poor & Mexican
my family only spoke spanish
& in school i felt so lonely
my loneliness would walk home with me
my l
oneliness held my hand as i crossed streets
my loneliness spoke spanish like my family
& this is how i learned to equate
my family with loneliness
how i learned to hate my family
how i learned to hate being Mexican
& i watched a lot of tv
& everyone was rich & white
& what i wanted was to grow up
& be rich & white & speak english
on shows like Seinfeld or Friends
on shows with laughtracks, big hair, & cardigans
& what i wanted was friends
to walk home from school with me
& what i wanted was a teacher
to give me gold stars like the other kids
& what i wanted was to stop eating welfare nachos
with government cheese
& it was kindergarten
& i loved all the white girls in my class
Robin & Crystal & Jen & all of the white girls
whose names i’ve forgotten
i wanted to kiss them
i thought kisses were magic
& i hoped i could learn english through a kiss
that i could run my hands through their hair
& find a proper accent
i loved white girls
as much as i hated
being lonely & Mexican
lord, i am a 25 year old man
& sometimes still a 5 year old boy
& i love black women & latina women
& i tell them in spanish
how beautiful they are
& they are more beautiful & lovely
than all the white women in the world
i tell them in spanish
how lonely it is to live in english
& they answer with a remix of my name
yo se, yo se, yo se
José Olivarez
Talks about Race
I have dark skin, dark face, and darkened eyes—
the white resides only outside the pupil.
I don’t know how to think of this—
I wasn’t taught to notice one’s colors;
under the sun, everyone’s skin bounces streaks of light.
Which do I claim? It is difficult to explain
the difference between African & African American
the details escape me, thin paper folding the involucre of a burning fire.
I am “other”; it is such
an indistinguishable form, beyond the construct of the proper self.
Sometimes I am asked
if I am Indian, Middle Eastern, or Biracial;
I don’t know what to say to these people
who notice the shape of the eye before its depth