acceptance, as people do under martial law.
Days prior to the date, things disappeared
in the house: the display cabinet taken away by an aunt,
the wedding gift china wares in it sold, except for the blue plates
and swan-shaped bowls that would not survive the journey.
The rice bin was given to a family friend; knives
to Uncle Leo; school uniforms, cousins; roosters divided
among the men; floral fabrics for the women; dried
mangoes and stale squid candies for the neighborhood
children; a twin bed transported upstairs
for my sister staying to complete college.
That late July morning, the jeepney arrived,
as hired, the sun held dominion over the blinding sky,
a zephyr funneled through the narrowing streets
of Manila. The steady procession of
well-wishers in our house did not halt,
my father handing out pesos
as if he was paying for our safe passage.
Surrounded by luggage and boxes huge
as baby elephants, we were each given
a dollar bill, our firsts, as the jeepney drove off
to take us to the airport, leaving behind a throng
of onlookers waving violently, and a tearful, older sister
who, years later, would reenact this disappearing act,
this fading scene of a rooster-lined road of this
cockfighting, banana tree-lush town speeding away,
lost in the kinetic gray cement and dark smoke of exhaust.
Joseph O. Legaspi
Immigrant
I am not buckled safely into my seat
I am watching the road unravel
behind us like a ribbon of dust.
Through the back window of my uncle’s Datsun
Amman looks like a tender little place
the color of my teddy bear’s fur.
Its houses crowded into one another
on its seven parched hills
are the shades of my family’s skin—
almond of my mother’s brow,
wheat of my father’s arms,
tea-with-cream of my grandmother’s palms.
We are driving away on the only road to the airport.
We are driving away from this dollhouse town
and my storybook childhood of tree-climbing
and laughter of too many cousins to count.
We are driving away from impending war.
We are driving away
because we can leave
on the magic carpet of our navy blue
US passports that carry us
to safety and no bomb drills
to the place where the planes are made
and the place where the president
will make the call to send the planes
into my storybook childhood
over the seven hills
next door to neighbors who will now
become refugees.
We are driving and I
am not safe
driving away from
myself and everything I know
into the great miracle of
a country so large
wars are kept thousands of miles at bay.
My young life is coming undone
on the road behind me
where I know all the names of
the trees in Arabic
rumman saru zayzafoon
and I know the spot on each hilltop
where the crimson poppies return every spring
and I know the best bakery to line up for
Ramadan pancakes before breaking the fast.
In the backseat of my uncle’s Datsun
I want to float through the window
and into yesterday
when August was just late-afternoon ice cream
and late-night card games
and the crinkle of brown paper and tape
covering copybooks,
fresh as this morning’s bread,
ready to receive the school year ahead—
math equations,
poems,
histories of battle.
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
First Light
I like to say we left at first light
with Chairman Mao himself chasing us in a police car,
my father fighting him off with firecrackers,
even though Mao was already over a decade
dead, & my mother says all my father did
during the Cultural Revolution was teach math,
which he was not qualified to teach, & swim & sunbathe
around Piano Island, a place I never read about
in my American textbooks, a place everybody in the family
says they took me to, & that I loved.
What is it, to remember nothing, of what one loved?
To have forgotten the faces one first kissed?
They ask if I remember them, the aunts, the uncles,
& I say Yes it’s coming back, I say Of course,
when it’s No not at all, because when I last saw them
I was three, & the China of my first three years
is largely make-believe, my vast invented country,
my dream before I knew the word “dream,”
my father’s martial arts films plus a teaspoon-taste
of history. I like to say we left at first light,
we had to, my parents had been unmasked as the famous
kung fu crime-fighting couple of the Southern provinces,
& the Hong Kong mafia was after us. I like to say
we were helped by a handsome mysterious Northerner,
who turned out himself to be a kung fu master.
I don’t like to say, I don’t remember crying.
No embracing in the airport, sobbing. I don’t remember
feeling bad, leaving China.
I like to say we left at first light, we snuck off
on some secret adventure, while the others were
still sleeping, still blanketed, warm
in their memories of us.
What do I remember of crying? When my mother slapped me
for being dirty, diseased, led astray by Western devils,
a dirty, bad son, I cried, thirteen, already too old,
too male for crying. When my father said Get out,
never come back, I cried & ran, threw myself into night.
Then returned, at first light, I don’t remember exactly
why, or what exactly came next. One memory claims
my mother rushed into the pink dawn bright
to see what had happened, reaching toward me with her hands,
& I wanted to say No. Don’t touch me.
Another memory insists the front door had simply been left
unlocked, & I slipped right through, found my room,
my bed, which felt somehow smaller, & fell asleep, for hours,
before my mother (anybody) seemed to notice.
I’m not certain which is the correct version, but what stays with me
is the leaving, the cry, the country splintering.
It’s been another five years since my mother has seen her sisters,
her own mother, who recently had a stroke, who has trouble
recalling who, why. I feel awful, my mother says,
not going back at once to see her. But too much is happening here.
Here, she says, as though it’s the most difficult,
least forgivable English word.
What would my mother say, if she were the one writing?
How would her voice sound? Which is really to ask, what is
my best guess, my invented, translated (Chinese-to-English,
English-to-English) mother’s voice? She might say:
We left at first light, we had to, the flight was early,
in ear
ly spring. Go, my mother urged, what are you doing,
waving at me, crying? Get on that plane before it leaves without you.
It was spring & I could smell it, despite the sterile glass
& metal of the airport—scent of my mother’s just-washed hair,
of the just-born flowers of fields we passed on the car ride over,
how I did not know those flowers were already
memory, how I thought I could smell them, boarding the plane,
the strange tunnel full of their aroma, their names
I once knew, & my mother’s long black hair—so impossible now.
Why did I never consider how different spring could smell, feel,
elsewhere? First light, last scent, lost
country. First & deepest severance that should have
prepared me for all others.
Chen Chen
Origin / Adoption
My first mother placed inside my mouth
a thick tongue / a curled tongue
prone to quick rolling music
and bramble-berried consonants
I would never speak to her.
These days, on this other hemisphere
I twist my second mother’s words
from my tongue as I do
the fruit from my neighbor’s tree:
geu-rhim / cham-eh / / fig and yellow
melon arching over the sidewalk,
ripening into dark hills / deep sun.
These days, I peel this craving
already budded with discomfort,
recover utterances too long untouched,
as if I could know the correct
taste of each vowel / inflections
sweet on my fingers and chin.
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello
Dear America
You used to creep into my room,
remember?
I was eleven and you kept coming,
night after night, in Tehran, slid in
from inside the old radio on my desk, past
the stack of geometry homework, across
the faded Persian carpet, and thrust
into me, with rock and roll thumps.
I loved you more than bubble gum,
more than the imported bananas
street vendors sold for a fortune.
I thought you were azure, America,
and orange, like the sky, and poppies,
like mother’s new dress, and kumquats.
I dreamed of you America, I dreamed
you every single night with the ferocity
of a lost child until you became true like flesh.
And when I arrived at you, you punched
yourself into me like a laugh.
Sholeh Wolpé
Second Attempt Crossing
In the middle of that desert that didn’t look like sand
and sand only,
in the middle of those acacias, whiptails, and coyotes, someone yelled
“¡La Migra!” and everyone ran.
In that dried creek where forty of us slept, we turned to each other,
and you flew from my side in the dirt.
Black-throated sparrows and dawn
hitting the tops of mesquites.
Against the herd of legs,
you sprinted back toward me,
I jumped on your shoulders,
and we ran from the white trucks, then their guns.
I said, “freeze Chino, ¡pará por favor!”
So I wouldn’t touch their legs that kicked you,
you pushed me under your chest,
and I’ve never thanked you.
Beautiful Chino—
the only name I know to call you by—
farewell your tattooed chest: the M,
the S, the 13. Farewell
the phone number you gave me
when you went east to Virginia,
and I went west to San Francisco.
for Chino
You called twice a month,
then your cousin said the gang you ran from
in San Salvador
found you in Alexandria. Farewell
your brown arms that shielded me then,
that shield me now, from La Migra.
Javier Zamora
Bent to the Earth
They had hit Ruben
with the high beams, had blinded
him so that the van
he was driving, full of Mexicans
going to pick tomatoes,
would have to stop. Ruben spun
the van into an irrigation ditch,
spun the five-year-old me awake
to immigration officers,
their batons already out,
already looking for the soft spots on the body,
to my mother being handcuffed
and dragged to a van, to my father
trying to show them our green cards.
They let us go. But Alvaro
was going back.
So was his brother Fernando.
So was their sister Sonia. Their mother
did not escape,
and so was going back. Their father
was somewhere in the field,
and was free. There were no great truths
revealed to me then. No wisdom
given to me by anyone. I was a child
who had seen what a piece of polished wood
could do to a face, who had seen his father
about to lose the one he loved, who had lost
some friends who would never return,
who, later that morning, bent
to the earth and went to work.
Blas Manuel De Luna
A Hymn to Childhood
Childhood? Which childhood?
The one that didn’t last?
The one in which you learned to be afraid
of the boarded-up well in the backyard
and the ladder to the attic?
The one presided over by armed men
in ill-fitting uniforms
strolling the streets and alleys,
while loudspeakers declared a new era,
and the house around you grew bigger,
the rooms farther apart, with more and more
people missing?
The photographs whispered to each other
from their frames in the hallway.
The cooking pots said your name
each time you walked past the kitchen.
And you pretended to be dead with your sister
in games of rescue and abandonment.
You learned to lie still so long
the world seemed a play you viewed from the muffled
safety of a wing. Look! In
run the servants screaming, the soldiers shouting,
turning over the furniture,
smashing your mother’s china.
Don’t fall asleep.
Each act opens with your mother
reading a letter that makes her weep.
Each act closes with your father fallen
into the hands of Pharaoh.
Which childhood? The one that never ends? O you,
still a child, and slow to grow.
Still talking to God and thinking the snow
falling is the sound of God listening,
and winter is the high-ceilinged house
where God measures with one eye
an ocean wave in octaves and minutes,
and counts on many fingers
all the ways a child learns to say Me.
Which childhood?
The one from which you’ll never escape? You,
so slow to know
what you know and don’t know.
Still thinking you hear low song
in the wind in the eaves,
story in your breathing,
grief in the heard dove at evening,
and plentitude in the unseen bird
tolling a
t morning. Still slow to tell
memory from imagination, heaven
from here and now,
hell from here and now,
death from childhood, and both of them
from dreaming.
Li-Young Lee
Immigrant Aria
there they blow, there they blow, hot wild white breath out of the sea!
—D. H. Lawrence
To swallow new names like krill, dive.
You have few tides before you
return to motion. Once this shrine
was the abyssal plain. Once Empire
shackled you. Once you answered to monster,
to dragon, spewing steam, fire
bellowing in the furnace of your hide,
a migrant captured for brown skin’s
labor. Somewhere inside the darkness
where brews flame, a spirit hovers
over the deep. Once before Adam named
you illegal you snaked, breaking
into air. Spit out his poison, jaw-clap
the sea. With your aft-fin’s trailing edge
churn surface to milk. In the beginning,
you were formed with great light.
Rajiv Mohabir
On Being American
You are seven years old when a grown man screams at you, spitting knives from crooked purple lips: Go home, fucking Paki.
You are confused because the ethnic slur is inaccurate.
You realize, too young, that racists fail geography but that their epithets and perverted patriotism can still shatter moments of your childhood.
You are the last to know that everyone else sees you as Other.
You keep your eyes on your paper and study and do well and stay quiet and obey.
You get patted on the head and told you’re one of the good ones.
You are a model.
Until you aren’t.
Because those manners you once minded and that tongue you once bit won’t be held back anymore.
Can’t be.
And what they think is rebellion is, in truth, survival. Because if you stay silent one second longer, the anger surging through your blood will engulf you in flames.
So you snatch their words from the air:
Terrorist
Rag head
Sand nigger
And burn them like kindling and rub the embers onto your skin, a sacrilege, a benediction, a qurbani.
For the girl you once were.
For the girl you are becoming.
The one who doesn’t ask to be recognized,
But demands to be known.
The one who presses into her fears to speak out. To stand up. To live. Anything else is death.
Ink Knows No Borders Page 2