Ink Knows No Borders

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by Patrice Vecchione


  the sound of the tongue before its wisdom

  the openness of a palm before its reach.

  And what to those who call me “African”?

  Don’t they know I can count the years spent back home

  wishing I knew I was “African”?

  And how to cradle and contain the disappointment that is

  rekindled whenever someone does not know

  my Ethiopia, my Eritrea.

  I don’t know how to fit, adjust myself within new boundaries—

  nomads like me have no place as home, no way of belonging.

  Mahtem Shiferraw

  Mama

  I was walking down the street when a man stopped me

  and said,

  Hey yo sistah, you from the motherland?

  Because my skin is a shade too deep not to have come from foreign soil

  Because this garment on my head screams Africa

  Because my body is a beacon calling everybody to come flock to the

  motherland

  I said, I’m Sudanese, why?

  He says, ’cause you got a little bit of flavor in you,

  I’m just admiring what your mama gave you

  Let me tell you something about my mama

  She can reduce a man to tattered flesh

  without so much as blinking

  Her words fester beneath your skin and the whole time,

  You won’t be able to stop cradling her eyes.

  My mama is a woman, flawless and formidable in the same step.

  Woman walks into a war zone and has warriors

  cowering at her feet

  My mama carries all of us in her body,

  on her face, in her blood

  And blood is no good once you let it loose

  So she always holds us close.

  When I was 7, my mama cradled bullets in the billows of her robes.

  That same night, she taught me how to get gunpowder out of cotton

  with a bar of soap.

  Years later when the soldiers held her at gunpoint

  and asked her who she was

  She said, I am a daughter of Adam, I am a woman, who the hell are you?

  The last time we went home, we watched our village burn,

  Soldiers pouring blood from civilian skulls

  As if they too could turn water into wine.

  They stole the ground beneath our feet.

  The woman who raised me

  turned and said, don’t be scared

  I’m your mother, I’m here, I won’t let them through.

  My mama gave me conviction.

  Women like her

  Inherit tired eyes,

  Bruised wrists and titanium-plated spines.

  The daughters of widows wearing the wings of amputees

  Carry countries between their shoulder blades.

  I’m not saying dating is a first-world problem, but these trifling

  motherfuckers seem to be.

  The kind who’ll quote Rumi, but not know what he sacrificed for war.

  Who’ll fawn over Lupita, but turn their racial filters on.

  Who’ll take their politics with a latte when I take mine with tear gas.

  Every guy I meet wants to be my introduction to the dark side,

  Wants me to open up this obsidian skin and let them read every tearful

  page,

  Because what survivor hasn’t had her struggle made spectacle?

  Don’t talk about the motherland unless you know

  that being from Africa means waking up an afterthought

  in this country.

  Don’t talk about my flavor unless you know

  that my flavor is insurrection, it is rebellion, resistance

  My flavor is mutiny

  It is burden, it is grit, and it is compromise

  And you don’t know compromise until you’ve rebuilt your home for

  the third time

  Without bricks, without mortar, without any other option

  I turned to the man and said,

  My mother and I can’t walk the streets alone

  back home anymore.

  Back home, there are no streets to walk anymore.

  Emtithal Mahmoud

  Split

  I see my mother, at thirteen,

  in a village so small

  it’s never given a name.

  Monsoon season drying up—

  steam lifting in full-bodied waves.

  She chops bắp chuối for the hogs.

  Her hair dips to the small of her back

  as if smeared in black

  and polished to a shine.

  She wears a deep side-part

  that splits her hair

  into two uneven planes.

  They come to watch her:

  Americans, Marines, just boys,

  eighteen or nineteen.

  With scissor-fingers,

  they snip the air,

  point at their helmets

  and then at her hair.

  All they want is a small lock—

  something for a bit of good luck.

  Days later, my mother

  is sent to the city

  for safekeeping.

  She will return home once,

  only to be given away

  to my father.

  In the pictures,

  the cake is sweet

  and round.

  My mother’s hair

  which spans the length of

  her áo dài

  is long, washed, and uncut.

  Cathy Linh Che

  When the Man at the Party Said

  He Wanted to Own a Filipino

  When the man at the party told me that he’d always

  wanted his very own Filipino, I should’ve said,

  all I’ve ever wanted was my very own 70-year-old

  white man (which is what he was), but I didn’t say

  that, because it wasn’t true. Instead, I said nothing,

  but I almost said, amicably: Yes, our bodies are banging,

  aren’t they? Our skin is leather upholstery beneath

  the savage sun, our eyes are fruits fallen from the highest

  trees, the bottoms of our unshod feet the color

  of amethyst. I almost said: We will parade around

  your living room in a linen cloth and feed you turtle eggs

  and Cornioles meat from a porcelain dish. I almost said:

  I’ll be your Filipino, you be my Viking. We’ll ride in

  a boat together. I’ll wear your horny helmet. But I said

  nothing. At that party, I wanted to be liked, which is

  my tragic flaw. I always find myself on the street smiling

  at people who look to be Neo-Nazis. I call it a “safety

  smile.” Rarely do they smile back, but I would hug them

  if they needed it, if I think it would spare me. I used to

  wonder if this amenability was inherited. Raja Humabon,

  a Filipino king in the 1500s, did not resist Magellan’s

  missionary agenda. Humabon greeted Magellan and his

  Christian lord with friendship. Maybe out of genuine

  religious feeling, or maybe servitude and friendship are a type

  of fire-retardant, protected from the torches that burned

  down the villages of the chiefs who refused to kneel. Of course,

  there were some who refused to kneel, and maybe this is

  also something inherited too, along with everything else,

  all the possible variations, and it doesn’t take me long to

  realize the flaws in this notion of an inherited friendliness.

  When I was thirteen or fourteen, the white husband

  of my parents’ friend showed me pictures of his Filipino

  wife in different bikinis, the ones she sent him in letters

  before he hopped on a plane to the Philippines to marry her.

  He had
a 5x7 album full of these photographs, these early

  flirtations. It made him nostalgic to sift through them.

  What’s good about my wife, he said, is that she’s easy

  on the eyes. A tuft of his chest hair appeared from the collar

  in his shirt, and the soul inside of me nearly choked on its

  own regurgitations. Before I could ask if he’d sent her

  pictures of himself, I heard his wife’s bright cackle from

  the other room, like the firing of artillery from a distant ship.

  I noted that she was not easy on the ears, that she was not

  easy at all. I realize now that this story was never about us

  being owned, because we will always own ourselves. This story

  is about the way the world believes that it owns us, holding

  its album of pictures in its wishful hands. And we are not

  amenable as much as we are insidious. We are the Cornioles,

  who, after being eaten alive by a whale, enters the whale’s body

  and takes small, tender bites of the whale’s enormous heart.

  Marianne Chan

  Ode to Enclaves

  My lineage is Little Saigon

  asphalt, three generations

  under one roof and mother-

  land recipes. On Saturdays,

  my family congregates

  at our favorite restaurant:

  Kim Phuong. Here, we worship

  the hot pot; stuff our bellies

  with blessings. My auntie says—

  If we’re gonna suffer,

  we gotta do it over good food.

  The pavement’s cracked

  but we know what to do. After

  all, these are neighborhoods of necessity.

  I remember

  the first time I saw white faces

  descend upon Little Saigon,

  their crooked beaks eager to pick

  meat off these streets. Squawking

  about craft beers and raw

  denim, their foreign tongues

  butcher every name on the menu.

  All their Yelp reviews sound the same—

  “I discovered a real gem in Little Saigon.

  So authentic! I give it 4 stars.

  Would have been 5, but the waitress

  could have smiled more.”

  Now, Kim Phuong has a 30-minute wait,

  plays Radiohead instead of Khánh Ly

  ballads. Waitresses speak enough English

  to accommodate vegan diets.

  Food bloggers all praise the tabernacle

  of my childhood, beg to know the magic

  of my people. In the 1800s,

  riots ignited violence against Chinese

  immigrants. After finding refuge

  in each other, they kindled new homes:

  Chinatowns. Haven’t Asian American enclaves

  always been neighborhoods of necessity?

  Before my people built this Little Saigon,

  white flight to the suburbs sucked

  this city’s economy down to its marrow.

  But we know how to take leftovers

  and forge something beautiful. Funny

  how this city would be boneyard

  without us. Now white folks flock

  back to the streets they deserted;

  rediscover everything we rebuilt.

  Of course we learned how to be digestible,

  how to shove our limbs into takeout boxes,

  skin ourselves and sell the flesh

  for profit. The owners of Kim Phuong

  can pay off debt, send their daughter to college.

  When their restaurant burns down

  one winter night, they do not cry.

  They can afford to rebuild everything.

  In Vietnamese, Kim Phuong means golden

  phoenix. I don’t say this for the irony.

  It’s not this poem’s punchline, but my people’s

  expectation that everything ours can burn

  at any second. Koreatown, Little India,

  Banglatown, Little Manila—no matter

  how many pick at the bones

  of immigrant communities,

  we always endure the scorch

  and cackle with a smile.

  These neighborhoods of necessity,

  always demanding we cook up

  the most authentic kind

  of survival: After all,

  if we’re gonna suffer,

  we gotta do it over good food.

  Chrysanthemum Tran

  Ethnic Studies

  In college, I sit in the back with all of the other students of color

  and listen as our white peers theorize the hell

  out of the oppression that we were born from.

  Buzzwords like institutionalized racism class warfare

  are sugar on their tongues—sweet and comfortable:

  words from a language my community

  doesn’t even know exists because we’re too busy

  living the realities of them.

  It’s one thing to major in Ethnic Studies,

  it’s another to be the reason

  for its existence.

  For the white students in my major,

  Ethnic Studies is like a free study abroad program

  that doesn’t require that they bring their baggage with them.

  A privilege that is easy for them to close in their textbook

  at the end of class.

  But study my racial profile until

  it exhausts you.

  Study how Black looks a lot like

  the green light for “stop and frisk.”

  How Brown has been made

  to look like a much-needed check stop

  for any given border. Ask me

  what it’s like to have your skin be made to

  feel like the nuclear missile we all know

  is coming.

  And you still won’t know how to sit in the back of a class

  and be studied because of how tragic your history is,

  as if we weren’t brought in to be dissected,

  as if Frogs, Rats and People of Color

  can only be understood when you cut them open.

  When ethnics study Ethnic Studies it’s not school anymore.

  It’s a lesson in survival.

  And I’m tired of playing teacher with my oppression.

  If I’m not doing it on a stage, I’m doing it from the margins of a classroom.

  I’m doing it from the margins in my notebook.

  Always on the margin of something never the core.

  Never asked to be more than what makes me easy

  to feel sorry for.

  It’s easy to avoid confronting the things that make us

  uncomfortable. The things that make us feel guilty.

  Who chooses to walk through the warzone

  if you were told that you don’t have to?

  If you grew up believing that there isn’t one?

  If what you don’t know won’t kill you?

  Race is the rent I pay for this skin.

  But the belief that racism doesn’t exist anymore

  is when I feel the foreclosure of this home taking my knees

  from right under me.

  You can’t claim that racism doesn’t exist

  when you’ve never known what it means to survive it.

  When you keep looking at the warzone like a teaching moment

  you’re not ready to learn the lesson from.

  A comfort zone you’re not willing to sacrifice.

  It’s easy to avoid confronting the things that make us

  uncomfortable. The things that make us feel guilty.

  But comfort is what kills us in the long run.

  Comfort is sitting down when you should be on your feet.

  It’s staying quiet when you should be speaking up.

  It’s speaking too
much, when you should be listening.

  It’s putting up borders for safety, and not

  bridges for healing.

  Comfort is celebrating diversity, but

  never discussing it.

  As if a black president is enough.

  As if a heritage month is enough.

  As if Ethnic Studies is enough.

  As if this poem is enough.

  Comfort is sitting in the front of the class

  forgetting that we’re sitting right behind you.

  Wanting to tell you that the warzone still exists.

  Wanting to tell you that

  this isn’t comfortable

  for any of us.

  Terisa Siagatonu

  The Day I Realized We Were Black

  my brother Hector was four hours late coming home from work

  when he entered the house He was angry I was holding his pet

  rabbit in my arms watching The Godfather—which part I can’t remember

  did I mention he was angry sixteen and angry

  and he said his legs ached like what the wind must feel against a

  tumbleweed

  and he said he was tired like death seemed easy like rice and beans

  and whatever meat we had that night was too hard to swallow

  and he said he wished we were white

  and I stood up startled my much lighter skin than his

  could not wrap my coarse hair around the idea that we were not that

  because my mother is Cuban with grey eyes

  because my father had an afro once but I had not noticed then

  because my grandfather once said “I wish I were King Kong so I could

  destroy Harlem and those fucking black cockroaches”

  because my godparents were Irish-American

  because I had suppressed my blackness

  because my brother shook me when I told him he was stupid we were Latino

  because he had missed his Jersey to Port Authority bus

  because he was walking to the nearest train station and lost his way

  because he was stopped by the police

  because he was hit with a stick

  because he was never given the right directions even though he begged

  because trash was thrown at him from the police cruiser’s window as he walked

  because he was never the same

  because we’re black

  because we’re black and I never knew I was twenty-two

  Yesenia Montilla

  quaking conversation

  i want to talk about haiti.

  how the earth had to break

  the island’s spine to wake

  the world up to her screaming.

  how this post-earthquake crisis

 

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