Tag: New Worlds ~ Asian American Poetry

Wendy Chin-Tanner’s debut collection Turn is forthcoming from Sibling Rivalry Press in March, 2014. Her poetry has appeared in Softblow, The Mays Anthology of Oxford and Cambridge, The Saint Ann’s Review, and The Raintown Review. She is a Founding Editor at Kin Poetry Journal, a Poetry Editor at The Nervous Breakdown, and the Staff Interviewer at Lantern Review.

No Moon

In the old beige station wagon straining forward
on the road like a dog 
frantically sniffing for the way home, 

we are lost in the winding countryside, overgrown
branches scratching the roof
as the signs bearing route numbers grow
too dark to read after a day spent hunting real estate;

a house, some land, some water
where we could run, a precaution after Chernobyl
when we drank only powdered milk and frozen juice for a year.

In the front seat, Ma and Ba sit
silhouetted in silence, sustained in the green glow
of the dashboard, a play
of shadows flitting from the landscape over their faces.

Across the broad lap of the leather backseat, I lie
supine as the daylight that had earlier been
so dazzling and bright dancing
in the paisley of the real estate agent’s scarf

fades from dusk to a black
whose dense immensity, though the opposite
of light, holds its own kind of clarity,
a reminder of how far 

you could fall, and I imagine that the car door
could suddenly unlatch and I would fly
out into that darkness, into the woods, into the universe.
Outside my window above the blur of dark shapes,
I scan the horizon for a steady still spot,

but a shooting star screeches like a skidmark
across the night and amid the clouds tumbling
thick and ink-smeared and round, 

there is no moon to be found until long after we arrive
when its battered face appears, 

a pale ghost hanging in the bright morning sky.

Little Death

Grandma, your tongue twists, making half-joined
sounds. Your good hand points to the bandages, asking 

why and when we will go. The nurses studiously
avoid your eyes, accustomed in their way to such 

little scenes; another day, another little death.
The summer I learned to read, I asked you the questions 

for the citizenship test. We rehearsed them
over and over again: Are you a Communist? 

No! you’d cry and I’d nod yes, smiling but afraid you might
not pass until finally, standing before the judge, you pledged 

your allegiance, hand over heart.  Your skin is soft and
plump like a girl’s, swollen from the IV, liver spots scattered 

sweetly like Brown-Eyed Susans in a field
of bruises. I massage your insteps, running 

my thumbs again and again over
your warm little feet. In my hands, 

they fit perfectly, arching and curling, toenails like pearls
clipped into miniature half moons. Each visit, we do this 

and then I leave. At home, with strong soap, I scrub
my hands clean. And I lead my husband to the bedroom.

Waylaid

brought a book
but watch her instead
only the width of the bar
between me and her workstation,
heat of the wood-fired oven 

she kneads expertly
her brown fingers slender and sure
but must be in training
while twirling the dough
says shit when she rips it
mounds my green salad too high
popping into her mouth
the fallen leaves

Crow Catching

A few deft steps.
Striking with both hands,
my father caught the crow–
wings pinned,
talons pointed away. 

We had been strolling–
my mother and father,
my wife and me.
Their first visit
to our first home,
an apartment overlooking
a dumpster near the levee. 

I never saw him
do this before,
though I knew
my grandmother
sometimes made
bird soup.

Performance now,
provision then.

Seraphim

Billy Collins writes of readers
who tie up poems, beat them with hoses,
torture confessions out of them. 
But some poems are so strong
they cannot be bound. 

We can wrestle with them
like Jacob with the angel,
but they grant us no blessing.
These seraphim–
ropes burn right off their blazing bodies.

Only turn the page and hope
they let us be.

On Eating Peanuts

It only hurts when I chew
on the left side of my mouth.
My dentist tried three times
to fix the offending tooth,
but I will not let him try again.
It’s not his fault. He trained at Harvard. 

Who am I to live pain-free?

Now I’ve the opportunity to remember
frailty, mortality.  Pain
a part of life, each peanut a jolt
of awareness and sin.
Thomas More had his hair shirt,
I molar #19.

Kim-An Lieberman is a writer of Vietnamese and Jewish American descent, born in Rhode Island and raised in the Pacific Northwest. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley. Her poetry collection, Breaking the Map, won the 2008 First Book Award from Blue Begonia Press.

Unearthing Song

Today I am a child, leaping from bank of silt
into chest-deep canal, droplets silvering my brow
in the flat sunlight. Yesterday I was my uncle, 

my grandfather, my grandmother, a nameless row
tied at the hands to haul buckets of dirt away
for a whisper of grain, chopping the steel-hard ground 

to the clashing of hubcaps, staccato bullet-spray
breaking time apart. Gun muzzle jabbed in the back,
we slash at the land until its arteries lie splayed 

and splashing, surging, indelibly green. We take
what we are given. We swallow what we must.
We clear skulls and jawbones from the floodgate

and burn what we are told to burn. Then today I am just
anyone, some random onlooker reading a dispassionate
news clip about the children of a faraway harvest,

six boys leaping from mudbank to silvering wet,
fed and happy, ignorant of what soft soils they till,
what buckets and buckets of blood. Every night

we rinse the white dust from our rice, let it boil
until the pot’s steaming broth is fragrant and clear,
no trace of iron or salt, no tang of human ill.

Meal after meal, we refuse to taste the labor,
the dark coagulate lodged between tongue and teeth.
So close the eyes. Swallow. We will dream our water 

and bread in the sweetest light, will fully believe
our foods pure and close to the source, will live days
drunk on ash and bone-flake, hungering for need.
Every season a communion. Every year another seed.

The Anti-Chinese Riot at Seattle, Washington Territory, Drawn By W.P. Snyder, From Sketches By J.F. Whiting, of Seattle (Harper’s Magazine, March 1886)

A century’s span—candles to streetlights,
horsecarts to highways, whole city blocks
rising and crumbling, ungathered, remade—
but surely that morning was Seattle as ever,
drizzle and damp, cool salt-cornered air,
sun not yet risen between sheets of grey.

One man graved this image, line by line,
carved out jackets, shirtsleeves, collars, fists,
a dark throng of hats. We do not need captions
to understand the crowd’s clamoring roar,
the police guard swashing rifles overhead,
or the begging, frenzied figures at the center.

Their billowing black sleeves, their slippers.
Their long manchurian braids. Loudly limned
even in miniature, faces oval and eyeless,
absent any tint to warm the honey of their skin.
Some stand in profile, arms reaching outward.
Some run, but not far. Some kneel as if to pray.

But no hurried fear in the artist’s arrangement.
One strong line sweeps sharply left to right,
cordoning the bullies, centering the victims.
The reporter’s type tells how the quarter doors
yielded to quiet force, to a shivering multitude
dragged from sleep and herded to the harbor.

Decades shy of the flashbulb, the halftone,
we can only imagine the truths of this tale.
A terrified boy stuffing his bag, no time to find
the silks that his sister hand-stitched to fit.
A pile of gambling counters, an upturned chair.
Blood and breaking. Cold tea in half-empty cups.

All we have here are faint echoes of memory,
an after-hours geometry, a footnote on the fold.
And just one clear face frozen in the scene—
low, corner right. Thick mustache, dark felt hat.
He is cheering the mob. Or protesting. Or simply
bearing witness, pencil in his upraised hand.

Jennifer Tseng’s book The Man With My Face (AAWW 2005) won the Asian American Writers’ Workshop’s National Poetry Manuscript Competition and a 2006 PEN American Center Beyond Margins Award.  Poems from her new manuscript Red Flower, White Flower have appeared in or are forthcoming in Cura, H.O.W. Journal, PEN America, Ploughshares, and From the Fishouse.  Chinese translations of several Red Flower, White Flower poems recently appeared in the Beijing journal Dear Whistle.

I love the poets ruled by love

Who write:  I am vexed to love you. 
As if love is a dog that leads
Them like lambs to the slaughter.
To be a lamb for love is human. 
To be a dog for love is human.

Here outside that pasture I am
Ruled by something else and yet
I love the poets ruled by love.
Please, take me to their leader.

Elegy with Red Flower

One vermillion poppy in a clover field.
Rain the field drinks you drink.
Sun that lights you lights the field.
The beasts trample you; the beasts ignore you as food.
They are like pandas who only want bamboo.
Though you grow in their sloe, cow-shaped shadows,
You will never be slung by their continental tongues,
Feel their teeth clip you like grass from your stem.
To them, you are nothing.
A failed color, a false scent.  To them,
You are a clover gone wrong.
What then will devour you, who then
Will you be, here, where you have landed,
Red flower in a stranger’s green field?

“…not quite the rose/not quite the roots…” – Lee Herrick

 Stem of the Hybrid Perpetual  

You hold the rose aloft.
You elevate.
If root is a secret
& rose a prize,
You are the telling.
In you the two are sisters.
Throat of happiness,
Singer of flames, music
Of red & white, your
Pinnate leaves evoke
A strange bird’s flight. 
Green road, you
Begin in darkness,
& end in light.
You touch everything.
You ascend.
You are the axis.
At your apex
A nation grows.
Suitor of heaven,
Child of earth,
Bearer of thorns & gifts,
You hold the rose.

Lee Herrick is the author of This Many Miles from Desire (WordTech Editions, 2007) and Gardening Secrets of the Dead, forthcoming from WordTech Editions in 2013.   His poems have appeared in ZYZZYVA, Hawaii Pacific Review, Many Mountains Moving, The Bloomsbury Review, and online at From the Fishouse, among others, and in anthologies such as Highway 99: A Literary Journey Through California’s Great Central Valley, 2nd Edition and The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems from the San Francisco Bay Watershed.  He is the founding editor of In the Grove, and he was the guest editor of New Truths: Writing in the 21^st Century by Korean Adoptees for Asian American Poetry and Writing (2010). He lives in Fresno, California and teaches at Fresno City College and in the low-residency MFA Program at Sierra Nevada College.

Kwi Ch’on            

for Ch’on Sang Pyong, 1930—1993

Because after imprisonment, you could laugh
with your mouth so wide open, as if to swallow
the swirling bats of the CIA, because when you
disappeared in 1971, your friends thought
about your poems and you going back to heaven,
because I am dreaming of the sunset over Eurwangni
tonight, there is jujube tea in Insadong waiting for us. 
Did you drink every hour of 1972? 
And when they found you, unable
to remember your name but that you were a poet,
did you remember the answer to your own question?
That there is no answer at all but the request that
someone would find you in that fractured slur,
the tired lean and the pen your only possession,
that someone like her, with a language like food,
would know how tea can restore such fatigue?

 Self-Portrait                    

I am twenty-five yards past the last breaking wave
a flute plateaued at the maestro’s steady baton hand
I am five stones from the last good wind 

I am four bones from a cow after the shotgun.
I am the idea that did not detonate. 

Brothers, we are Korean, so we know
about fracture – family, country, tongue.
We know the volcanic descent of government.

Once, a woman told me
I am the only one who understands
the cost of her survival.

So we did all we could.
We touched each other’s hands,
inhaled deeply, contemplated not letting go.

Katie Hae Leo is a poet, playwright, and essayist whose work has appeared in journals such as Asian American Literary Review, Water~Stone Review, Kartika Review, Midway Journal, Asian American Poetry & Writing, and Asian American Plays for a New Generation (in Sun Mee Chomet’s Asiamnesia).  Her chapbook Attempts at Location was a finalist for the Tupelo Press Snowbound Award and is available through Finishing Line Press.  She holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota.             

How to Divide a Peninsula

Here is a table.  It is a good table.  We agree that this table must be spread, like all good tables.  But what to spread it with?  Here is a fine linen, here silk, here cotton, here a stiff wool.  Each will share the beauty of this table.  As a child I often sat under a table but never once thought about what the table wanted.  Only legs and laps, only who owned them and what they meant to me.  Such is the strange fate of tables.  To exist only as we use them.  Tables do not know what they want.  Tables know heat and cold and the hands that touch them.  They measure time in flakes of wood.  If they could speak, their voices would be filled with dirt. 

No Gun Ri, or The Battle That Wasn’t

Four hundred porcelain cups lie broken in the sun.  Who will take responsibility?

The policy regarding cups dictates that all cups must first apply to the Bureau of Ceramic Housewares for permission to assemble in open fields.  This includes but is not limited to tea parties, picnics, family reunions, and outdoor banquets.

The official position on destruction of fine china is illustrated in a letter from the Ambassador of Dining to the Undersecretary of Kitchen Behavior.  In this letter the ambassador worries that the extermination of unauthorized cups within the conflict zone might damage relations between tea drinking countries. 

Remains of broken cups are still being discovered throughout the land.  If cups had souls, they would roam the streets, unsatisfied. 

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Collective Memory asks that all persons with knowledge of the cup incident report to their local branch, where they will be rewarded with a Starbucks gift card and a lifetime subscription to People magazine.

Jenna Le’s first full-length collection of poetry, Six Rivers, was published by New York Quarterly Books in 2011.  Her poems, essays, and translations have been published by Barrow Street, The Brooklyn Rail, New York Quarterly, Post Road, The Rumpus, Salamander, Sycamore Review, and others.  She has been a finalist in the William Carlos Williams Poetry Competition, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and a nominee for the PEN Emerging Writers Award.

Phillips Beach, 6 AM

The moon, to Tantric Buddhists, is a symbol
of masculinity.  Watch how he ambles
around the earth, an active little boy
gathering dirt-clods in his grubby hands,
gathering the tides, while the sun smiles blandly
from her throne at the milling hoi polloi.
It’s easy to see these things from the helm
of a boat off Phillips Beach at 6 AM:
the sun cupping her pregnant belly with both palms
the way a pyromaniac cups a flame.

Devotional

With the underside of your whiskered boar,
cast a shadow on my sprouting bean.
Bite a clay pipe while drowsing in my chair,
but no harder than you’d chew your own lip.
When tides submerge the footbridge between us,
send a moth in a box as your proxy.
Mention your wife in your will, but only as often
as you’ve cried out her name in dreams. 

In my orchard, the apples wear eyepatches
to hide their brown spots from view.
At the bottom of my wishing well,
a merman half-devoured by sharks lies gasping:
it’s been years since the well has known how to tell
my deepest wishes apart from his.

To an Aspiring Blues Singer

Your voice is so sweet that a heifer in heat
would tan her own hide, just to make you new shoes.
Your voice is so pure, all the butter and meat
in my pantry is yours to devour, if you choose.
Your voice is as green as unripe apple juice
that on your piano keys dribbles and spills.
But you’ll never be able to master the blues
if you think love’s an illness responsive to pills.

If you doubt me, just look at blues music’s elite:
Etta James, the great dame who on old records coos
that blindness is preferable to keen-eyed defeat,
knew all about love’s brutal nature.  She knew
neither cigarettes, heroin, Prozac, nor booze
can stifle the pain of love’s porcupine quills.
Knew you’ll never be able to master the blues
if you think love’s an illness responsive to pills.

Or consider Ms. Joplin, who, quite indiscreet,
took the stage to lament all the blowhards she’d screw
and be screwed by.  Love’s nothing so simple or neat
as a serotonin shortage, eh, shaggy chanteuse?
Love’s no less than a god, the dark twin of the Muse,
and Janis was one of his martyrs, his kills.
Child, you’ll never be able to master the blues
if you think love’s an illness responsive to pills.

I know what’s at stake, what you’re risking to lose:
when folks doubt you’re sane, they belittle your skills.
But you’ll never be able to master the blues
if you think love’s an illness responsive to pills.

Jeffrey Hecker was born in 1977 in Norfolk, VA, of quarter-hapa Japanese descent.   A graduate of Old Dominion University, his debut book Rumble Seat is published by San Francisco Bay Press (www.sanfranciscobaypress.com). Recent work has appeared in altdaily.com, Cannonball City, The Waterhouse Review (where he was nominated for a 2011 Pushcart Prize), the Los Angeles-based Zocalo Public Square, and forthcoming in London’s La Reata Review. He lives with his wife Robin in Olde Towne Portsmouth, Virginia, USA. 

Generations of Robertos Paying Attention

for Lisa A. Flowers

Roberto II knows exactly how many people live in every hacienda on the coast. 

Roberto III knows roughly how many haciendas stand unoccupied on the coast,
though none of the owners. 

Roberto IV couldn’t locate the guest bathroom in his own hacienda. 

Next week, Roberto III plans to drive Roberto IV to the countryside,
get lost on purpose. 

Can Roberto IV handle family business if Roberto III and Roberto II
disappear, during the Rapture for instance?  This is to be the test.  

Can Roberto IV rely upon an outdated map of a snow pea farm,
willful local migrant workers pointing shovel blades from sky to dirt?

Unfortunately, we’ll never know.  Roberto IV and Roberto III
visit Roberto II’s hacienda. 

The Boricua Popular Army visits seconds later,
gun stocks pressed hard against right shoulders,
even if left-handed.

Roberto IV asks Roberto III
“Why do mercenaries move so jerky?”
before both are shot dead. 

Roberto III had wanted to answer, “They’re appraising
our frescoes,” which would have sounded patronizing,
but understand Roberto III had asked Roberto II

the same question at a less strenuous time
and Roberto II had blown him off by cigar-puffing.  

The sultriest senorita among all Roberto IV’s haciendas prefers to sleep
in Roberto II’s hacienda.  She’s shot asleep.  Her sister is, instantly sultrier,
shot awake.  This is probably all for the best.

Large Moon Evaluation

Lieutenant Uhura was the first woman
to say no woman 

completely loves you
until you’re completely wrong 

and she completely backs you. 
Lieutenant Uhura was the first mother 

to tell another mother quit
talking like an infant to your husband 

baby like boss
father like god

sister like mechanic
sitter like physician

Christmas tree salesman like rapist
Shaposhnikov like Rachmaninoff.

Lieutenant Uhura, asked about earth,
responded “you mean 

the planet
I’m finally off?”

Bad Bathroom Breaks

Coyote Chipotle Eatery, 3 miles outside of Jeddito, Arizona

The sink to urinal threshold tile transitions Herringbone Mosaic to Basketweave Marquina
without warning.  The most we can hope for is to shake dry our urethras and continue
to look forward.  The pattern projects a step up where there is no step up.  There is no step. 
Many cowboys (I suspect cowgirls in the next room too) fall to the smooth sticky surface,
rebirth the word doosey.  I follow with the word illusion.  I wash but I do not dry my hands.

Rest Area, Curt Gowdy State Park, Cheyenne, Wyoming

It needs to be explained someday why a factory-produced sign appears only on the women’s
lavatory door reading: NO DWARVES BEFORE 6:30 P.M. I return to the jeep eager to tell
my wife, who didn’t have to pee, a timeless story.  She cuts me off.  In the parking lot,
she tells me I just missed a long line of tiny hookers, all checking wrist-watches,
brush past her kneecaps.  I ask, “No shit?”  She asks, “Didn’t I tell you I didn’t have to go?”

Homedale, Idaho, 4-H, Port-O-Let

This town’s name was chosen from a hat. Half the commode seat’s missing.  Front to mid-back,
it could be a mouth-guard for a giant.  No tank cover, the flapper gasps.  To sit requires a butt-
compression counterproductive to the act required of its cheeks.  I hear spades shoveling outside
these plastic walls, unsuccessful prior visitors digging holes.  One says she’ll happily leave her
tool for me in case I’m irregular.  I don’t know how to thank her.  I’m regular.

Yim Tan Wong was born in Kowloon, Hong Kong, and spent her formative years in the American mill town of Fall River, Massachusetts.  She studied English and French Literature at Emory University and earned an MFA from Hollins University, where she also received a teaching fellowship and an Academy of American Poets Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Portland Review, Spillway, Off the Coast, Crab Orchard Review, Crab Creek Review, MARGIE, and Michigan Quarterly Review, among other journals.

Acacia Moon / Tornado Snow

                                    after René Magritte’s Key to Dreams (1930)

Slice a window into six glass squares. Float an egg
inside square one. In two, flaunt a footless shoe
with tassels & a two-inch heel.  Drift a derby hat
beneath the tacit egg, and below the shoe, a candle melts,
flame unflickering, still as water imitating glass,
block five’s clear tenant. Frame six: a sledgehammer 

mid-swing. Angled forty-five degrees, the sledgehammer
is labeled le Désert as though smashed shells of eggs
compose the desert’s sand instead of shattered glass.
Glass, aka l’Orage, is a static, crystal storm, what the shoe
once bet the nimbostratus could not do. Definitions melt.
Word & picture alloys vow: “Snow” is but a word for “Hat.”

Have you ever worn storm snows like dusty, floppy hats?
Unleashed a glass anger that could break a thousand hammers?
Or watched a mirror liquefy your face & melt
its cloud-patched skin into the canary scramble of an egg?
Have you felt in you a ghost foot as though you were a shoe?
Or panicked when you did not see yourself in a looking-glass?

Spell “Glass” S-T-O-R-M, though others may insist G-L-A-S-S.
Letters are but coins: They clink & toast inside a tongueless pauper’s hat.
Whether you call La Lune “the moon”, “a camel” or “a gnu”, a shoe—
but not a shoe—is what the high-heeled, tasseled hammer
slings, cooking dim, dim din. Yet, trust René’s elliptic map, equating “Egg”
to tree “Acacia,” burning worn-out routes until it melds melted

canals into nightmare, love, a war, a law, or lie. Clarity forever melts,
twists up the funnel’s train wreck roar & snowflakes made of glass
mosaic the tornado’s spinning trail of wrecks.  An orphaned egg,
free-range, freestyles new names for moons circling planet Hat.
Cosmologists calculate no ceiling to what one can hammer
picture-word relationships into, so, wear this chaos like a shoe

of shell, of fire, glass or sand, this shape-shifting shoe
that glistens like a patent leather moon, ever-melting
cantabile through freelance wind and wax. The master hammers
silicate alphabets out of shredded dictionaries and prescription glass
to read, to really see, past paint, past words of sand, la Neige, the hat,
giraffes who munch acacia leaves where some insist they see an egg.

Rocket through this shuffled world; wear its red-red shoes of glass.
Words are storms & beasts: they melt & mate, trade identities like hats.
Sledge your hammer! Order disorder, the mayhem omelet of a restless egg.

Rene, on your birthday,

I did not wash the green                apples                                 before I ate.
That would have been                   like bathing                        a reel of film,
or rinsing the telephone                 in soapy                             water.
Apples were machines                  linking                                brushstrokes
to a crucial deep                            breath                                 I fought to catch
and stack                                       inside                                  my chest
though my lungs                            resisted,                             contracted.
To disconnect                                distances                            from Brussels
to Boston, my teeth                        to your hair,                      from smoke
to a tuba                                         on fire,                              from rain
to an age of ice                               —trapped                          between
what I tasted                                   with my eyes,                    and pinched
by what I saw                                 in shadows,                       sung to
by pulses                                        I heard                               with the heel of my hand,
whatever was trapped                    between                             sensation
and translation,                               in one bite,                        my incisors
sliced                                              past                                    its sour skin,
through its wiry core,                      to the secretive                  seed.
It was the core                                of a day                              that could fill
a room                                            with an apple                     tall as the ceiling,
wide                                                as the Seine.                      I bragged
to the nearest                                  listening soul,                     an open, floating
umbrella,                                         that this                              was my first
fair                                                  -weather                             cloud.
My heart,                                        also an umbrella,                unsure
it was raining,                                 opened, collapsed,             opened once more.

Rey Escobar lives in Evanston, IL. with his wife Christine, founder of Green Parent Chicago (http://greenparentchicago.com), and their two self-educated kids, Ezra and Lucie. He is a member of the Next Objectivist, address in the ether: http://nextobjectivists.blogspot.com/, physical evidences: twice a month at http://messhall.org/   

Identity crisis invents                                         the indigo                     Inspector Sands, his audiophile abiding       
idiopathic criticism inverses                               the indisposition           Inspector Sands, his bitch box budding
idleness crock investigations                              the indium                    Inspector Sands, his ceramic pickup callow
idyll crone  invidious                                         the individualize           Inspector Sands, his derive four channel dewy
igloo cropper invitationals                                 the indolent                   Inspector Sands, his ear blower enduring
ignominy crossbreed invokes                            the induce                     Inspector Sands, his fueled audio frozen
indicated-horsepower crossfire invulnerable     the indulged                  Inspector Sands, his gramaphone green
ilium crosspollination iodizes                            the industrialized           Inspector Sands, his high-fidelity hand in glove
illadvised crossway innings-pitched                  the inebriated                Inspector Sands, his intercom intact
illfated crotchety infrared                                   the ineligible                 Inspector Sands, his jukebox juiced up
illinois crowd irate                                             the inertia                      Inspector Sands, his kinetic stereo keeping things raw
illstarred cruciate iridiums                                  the inexcusable             Inspector Sands, his lance voice lasting
illusage crudity irk                                             the inexpert                   Inspector Sands, his mono needle maidenly
illustrate cruiser ironic                                       the infallible                   Inspector Sands, his nickel quadrophonic new
image crummier ironware                                 the infantile                    Inspector Sands, his out herod Herod original untouched

Tiel Aisha Ansari is a Sufi, martial artist, and data analyst living in the Pacific Northwest. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Bruised Peach, Islamica Magazine, Windfall, Verseweavers, The Lyric, Barefoot Muse, and the VoiceCatcher anthology from Portland Women Writers. Her poetry has been featured on KBOO, Prairie Home Companion and MiPoRadio and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her collection Knocking from Inside is available from Ecstatic Exchange. You can visit her online at https://www.knockingfrominside.blogspot.com and https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/TielAishaAnsari

At the Japanese Peace Garden in Waterfront Park

the boulders stand brown and angular
like neglected teeth. Chiseled kanji
spell out the haiku of exile
across their weathered faces.
Here, a glimpse out a train window
of a home rolling backward out of sight;
there, the names of camps,
desert stretching away
beyond barbed wire.

Today cherry petals were falling,
stroking the surfaces of stone.
Today a young couple was being photographed
in a bridal dress and a natty suit.
Holding each other under the flowering trees
and drinking from opposite sides of a fountain
like their parents, sipping from opposite ends of an ocean.

I thought the rocks had turned to a row of old women
wiping drops of Oregon rain
from their stone faces.
I wanted to line up a row of pebbles at their feet
and say “Here, Grandmothers,
here are your grandchildren.”

Scraps

The old women who came over from China
owned narrow-skirted dresses with round high collars
that buttoned above the left breast. Dresses made from:
grey silk embroidered with flying cranes
scarlet heavily brocaded with bamboo
pink satin heaped with plum blossoms like summer snow.
Delicate fabrics stretched over stiff shells.

We, the daughters fed on American beef
the round-eyed granddaughters,
could not fit our larger frames into those dresses.
We cut them up, repurposed the cloth
as vests or fancy cushions. 

I had never seen my grandmother wear those clothes.
She chose wash-n-wear, slacks and pantsuits, occasionally a skirt
saying “It’s easier,
I’m too old for fancy clothes.”
I quilt together scraps of cloth and stories:

this is the dress in which my grandfather first saw her
and forgot all about the political meeting he was supposed to attend
this is the one she was wearing when the Japanese bombs began to fall
and she protected my infant mother with only her own body
in this one she took ship for a new land that would fill her children’s mouths
with a foreign tongue. I rip a seam.
I stitch another square.

Jason Wee is an artist and a writer. He is a co-editor of Softblow Poetry Journal and the author of My Suit (Math Paper Press 2011). He lives in Cambridge, New York and Singapore.

Parts

Think of an older body lying on
top of a younger body. 

Think of that body above waking up
slightly startled at the sight 

of having slept with one’s long lost self,
the bed a time machine 

bringing one back to another dark room,
when one touches a stranger 

for the solace usually found alone.
Think of the body below 

stirring, brushing its hands on bits and parts,
a pit of coarse hair, elbows,

ribs, returning to slumber, satisfied
with the evidence of flesh 

careworn and starved, knowing the shape of
a self so disappointed

proves its power to unmake experience,
to ignore pain as it stands

for another year, hour, another song
passing. The older hums, stops.

When the body below wakes, will it know
those eyes it looks in on, or 

nothing grasped, will it ask to be known
naked and seized for the first time?

Vanni Taing is currently pursuing an MFA in poetry at Western Michigan University, and is a 2010 recipient of WMU’s Gwen Frostic Creative Writing scholarship. Her work has appeared in Lantern Review, CURA, and others.

The Boat

I built my home in a bottle. My father said I should have built a plane, but I said, no. Think of the expenses. A Gulfstream can burn anywhere from 250 to 440 gallons of fuel an hour. Where will the money come from, I ask him, I have no money. So I built a small boat in my bottle to retire to when I tired of my mother’s accusations: You want get raped, huh? You cut hair like boy. You ugly.

Her knuckles clock the glass. I do not come out. I strap myself in and wait for the gales to subside. She rolls the bottle, round and round and I hear the sounds of air: pressure, release, confinement.  I peer up the thick neck and study its narrow mouth.

 Jason Bayani is a recent Austin, TX transplant, by way of the Bay Area. A graduate of Saint Mary’s MFA program in Creative Writing, he is a Kundiman fellow and a highly regarded veteran of the National Poetry Slam scene. His work has been published in Fourteen Hills, Muzzle Magazine, the National Poetry Slam Anthology, Rattapallax, and Write Bloody’s classroom anthology, Learn Then Burn. He has been on 7 National Poetry Slam teams, he is a National Poetry Slam finalist, and was the 2010 International World Poetry Slam representative for Oakland, California. He has worked as a counselor and mentor for at-risk youth and taught at Saint Mary’s College.

Ride

Every day during lunch break
Chuy Moreno would roll his ’67 Chevy Impala
round the front of John F. Kennedy High School,
his chassis waving like a Palm Sunday frond. 

He was 16, cheekbones raw with acne,
had a mean mug more metal
than his box grill. He was a carpenter
who was a carpenter’s son. And learned enough

to know where to sign the contract, and where
commas and decimals belong in his paycheck.
Sometimes after cruising the roundabout
a few times, he would open his side door

and let a couple of the freshmen ride in the backseat
while he hit the hydraulics. We’d sit, cross armed
bending our mouths against our bottom lips, our mouths

that ached to say, again, again, again, again…

Playgrounds and Other Things

Finally let me say that I think my poem…is not “racist” but “racially complex.”— Tony Hoagland

The “privileged” white male has taken enough of a beating, don’t you think?— anonymous Internet commenter

I’m a runaway slave-master— Iggy Azalea

I.

Eighteen, and every day the city expands
inside of my lungs. I live this in full
heaving breaths, like I finally made it
to a clearing where the white kids couldn’t catch me
anymore… and we boys, bold and buried in invincible
swagger slapped on with so much bad cologne–
that day in the city, bass piping out of
our spindly forearms, we erupted into downtown
like we could dap the streets for all its shine;
and the old lady sculpted into the corner
of Sutter and Stockton–leaning into the wind–
I heard her tell it like broken glass,
“Go back to your country”. Couldn’t get angry enough
to breathe right; trying to remember if there was a word
for what makes you suddenly clutch your chest.

II.

Now imagine being told that she was only trying
to understand her racism (it’s complex, you know). Art
is what happens to her. You need to let it frame in the air.
There is art to recognition, the art is in the naming,
art is a mirror, you can make art out of this. You must
say it, before you can name it. There is no art
in being safe. You must risk uncomfortable truth.
The experience is not yours alone. This experience
is not owned by you. It is art, brave and honest art.

And how many more stories of trauma do we need to hear
from its least willing participants? Art rejects
the familiar. We’ve heard this story already. Stop
telling us this story already. The story is the old woman
glaring through her oversized sunglasses
at three brown boys who would presume to be this comfortable.

III.

Imagine being asked to applaud
and feeling guilty that it takes
you so long to remember you have hands.

IV.

I’m willing to say that we share
this particular sandbox equally.

You just have to let me kick sand in your face
for at least thirty years.

V.

There is nothing brave in showing this face.
I, too, find it real easy to talk
about how much I hate white people. It’s a pastime.
I eat that shit with my morning cereal. Most difficult
is the velocity of how I love you; things you can’t
turn off. There, dawg, is all the complex
racism any one of us can handle.

Note to poem: In 2011, at the annual AWP (Associated Writing Programs) Conference, Claudia Rankine read an open letter to Tony Hoagland, challenging him on his handling of race in his poetry. This was followed by a response from Hoagland, which prompted heated discussions around the topics of race and agency in art.

Minh Pham is currently working towards an MFA in Creative Writing at University of California, Riverside. He was born in Saigon, Vietnam and became a Riverside, CA native at age eight. He gained an interest in writing during his childhood when his father told him Vietnamese folktales and when his mother told him stories of how she survived the Vietnam War.

PTSD

I know your brain is made out of coils of bullets
Because you told me all you hear
Is gunfire.
But other fathers have been able to win the war
Inside their heads. They are able to forget
The scent of burnt flesh, the taste of metal
From exploding shell fragments, the sounds
Of a woman’s scream
For her dead child,
And the feeling of holding their
Uniformed brother’s
Cold body in their hands.
How come you can’t
Fight the war that continues inside your head
Since 1975?

Lisa Shirley has a Master of Fine Arts in writing from Sarah Lawrence College.  She has been published in several places, included Sidewalks, The Carleton Miscellany and The Interlochen Review.  She is sansei (third generation Japanese American) — her mother’s family came from Kyushu in the early 1900s.  She currently lives just outside New York City and works as a librarian to support her poetry habit.

Reunion Blues

There is something boring about me.
I mean, I have no idea how to get a gun and I have never
bought crack ­­– is there a brochure I can pick up?
People on the street never approach me if their business is the least unseemly,
but my friends come back from a walk in the park
with flyers for  “Big Daddy’s Piercing Parlor – bifurcation a specialty.”

I’m good with directions though,
I know how to drive from Minneapolis to Albuquerque without getting lost:
take 35W south to Texas, turn right. 

Maybe this is just mid-life kicking –
I am 38 . . . but I don’t smoke.

So I’m 38,
never married, no kids,
don’t have a job or a PhD.,
don’t have Siamese cats and live in the Berkeley Hills with a lover.

No money for a Porsche, even at 38,
so I’ll have to be satisfied with my first leather coat,
black and buttery smooth with a scent so delicate
it catches me only when I move.
Satisfied with the red hair dyed
to make me look like the woman I never was,
but someone passing might think, just perhaps, that I am.

After Chemo

                 for my mother, Hana Sonoda

She wears her skin lightly,
just covering the brightness of her bones.
As she walks towards the altar,
her skull gleams through a halo of hair
like the relics encased in candlelight.

Alabaster Wednesday – ashes
lowered onto her forehead shining with sweat.

Later, awake while the moon sleeps,
she lies coiled in the heavy night,
she traces the swell,
the rise under her skin, still growing.

And she dreams
her fingernails longer,

sharper – she has the strength
to reach in and tear it all out.

This Lent she will give up everything.

An Almost Perfect Day

My mother lies still on the sofa – not really
a sofa, a futon on a wooden frame that folds
into a bed.  My mother lies still on the futon.  From Kyushu,
she brought these padded cotton mats, the covers spread
with peonies.  My mother lies so still 
on the futon.  The Japanese don’t have a real “F”,
more “H” mixed with “F” – “Huhfah” – “futon:”
(my mother lies still) difficult to say –
a futile huff.  And I’m waiting
for my sisters.  I called Susan.  No,
Laura, my real sister, biological sister. 
Laura will pick up Susan.  If they each drove alone,
they’d be here so much
sooner.  My mother unmoving
and unmovable behind me
while the sky begins
to lighten.  It’s clear, I can tell, even without
a lot of sun, even though the moon
has gone down.  The sky is clear
and I think it will be . . . – my mother –
the first time in two weeks – clear,
no snow, warm
for December, – the futon  –
an almost perfect day:
– mother –  a day for winter coats left
unzipped,  a day for thin
gloves, a day for scarves draped
just for the look, a day
for anything.

Fall

I hate fall.  It has nothing to do with changing leaves,
      the wind sharpening from the North, or the short days or the coming snow.

No, I hate fall because three years ago, from September on,
I watched my mother die – I saw her skin loosen and her body shrink
until she was no longer my fat, round-faced mother,
until she was no longer my fat mother watching TV while we eat dill pickles,  pepperoni and
       barely-cooked steaks smothered in garlic salt,
until she became shaky and frail, slapping her legs when they wouldn’t carry her, saying,
      “Stupid, stupid!” as if her body were a child to be shamed into working,
until she became like a chick, eating the painkillers and the vitamins, the shark cartilage and
      the papaya enzymes I held out to her.

I hated all of this: I hated being alone and not knowing what to do,
and I hated that whatever I did, she continued dying,
and I hated her because she continued dying,
and I hate myself because I think she finally chose death when she saw her dying was too hard
       on me,
and I hate myself because I wish she had died earlier, before I quit my job and moved home,
and I hate her because she smoked and maybe brought this on us both,
and I hate that it was me – that I couldn’t disappear and let my sisters, or my brother, take over,
and I hate myself because I wish that she had just continued growing thinner and thinner, never
      quite reaching the vanishing point, that the pain continued in her forever because, in the
      end, her dying wasn’t too hard on me,
and I hate her because she couldn’t continue dying. 

And this is why I hate fall
because every day I remember the last night –
sitting in the dark – 4 am – waiting for the paramedics –
listening to her breathing and every day I remember
that I never thought to cover her bare feet –
even after she said, “I’m cold.  I’m so cold.”