POEMS
HOME
A way of spilling out.
On Zillow, Redfin, Realtor, I am looking for a good place to rest. Fresh-cut grass. A refracted light through a room. My in-law died in her bed, among her pink drapes, near her pink tub, pink carpet, and pillows. Soft hair in sunlight like a newborn—she sighed and dipped further into the hold of her bed. Mouth open. The imprint of her body on memory foam. A whole thought escaping.
We are all looking for beautiful tiles to lay on, open floor plans to gather in, vaulted ceilings to float toward, a mid-century modern dreamscape where the outside meets the inside, unburdened by the distinction. We are all looking to house a good death. Fresh-baked cookies. A place where my mother picks out the best pieces of meat to feed me—as if to say, there is no one else but you, there is no time but now.
A room fills with flowers and faces slung down, a wind passes through a window. Sympathy notes gathered at a table: apologies, condolences, a dry houseplant. A year after my father died, no one came for us. No more bouquets, or food, or company. Only the house held us. I am looking for a home, for an invitation, for a way to comfort my son when I’m gone. I am looking for a gently swinging For Sale sign, a place freed by one family to embrace another.
DUCKS
My ex-husband tried to have a safe word to deescalate conversations not going well. He refused to name one, so I did: Duck. From my son’s workbook, a mama duck and baby duck swim and dive and live in monosyllabic simplicity. We are going back to basics—solid words to say, to repeat, to respect. Duck. As in duck for cover. Or for duck’s sake. You are a ducking duck, duck head. Go duck yourself. Your whole ducking family is ducking ducked, you duck. Duck you, mother ducker. It was a good choice. Ducks are cute, round, fluffy, with their waddles and bread crumbs in the park, ducks bobbing like soap suds.
One time in the bath, I fell and thought I would die there, holding my breath like my landlord’s dead son who had died there, or my dog who also died there. Maybe a marriage is a dog’s final exhale that floats to the surface and passes away. There are so many ways to float. To be quiet. To get my ducks in a row, roast them, and hang them by the neck, display them in a dim-sum deli. Question marks by the pound. The concave eyes baked down and mouth open, we are all heart and hanging like barbecue—duck necks wrapped around the metal hooks of our sentences, the hooks in our language, the quiet turn inward, the escape plans dangling. A neck wrapped and wordless.
The water rises every day: the rising laundry, the percolating coffee, the packed lunch and duck hunt. I am the collapsed day, silenced into the next. Duck.
Red: Màu đỏ: Mao
“Vietnamese Voters Make Up the Largest Asian Demographic in Favor of Trump” – 2020 headline from The Stanford Daily
“Somehow... I don’t know what it is. The Vietnamese community loves me. And I love them.” - 2024 quote from The Diplomat from an article titled, “Donald Trump Visits a Vietnamese Restaurant”
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The color of Vietnamese is red, a communist red—màu of a small chairman in a yellow star, crisp tiny feet marching in unison to one song. An army for my mother, who wants to be loved, wants to constantly go to the bathroom. She hears the choir sing in unison, red rushing out like birds, arms outstretched—a girl in full napalm. We are naked and photographed, running in freefall. The singing my mother hears is love: a bruised-shaped obedience, unflinching, paternal.
She escaped this violent love story. Boat story. But after forty, fifty, sixty years of American dreams in American pants, being a free American manicurist, touching đỏ feet of so many đỏ mothers, she is a lost thought in the tide. Doted on in her Vietnamese newspapers, she finds comfort in the old ways. Mao’s way. She is looking for her dictator. The absolute father. The right way to be slapped. Her chairman.
There is something about him, that Donald, that Republican red promise. It compels like an old birdsong in unison: a flaming orange glow, a golden toupee, a swelling red pulp turned purple and green—a swelling of captivity. She is red and alone with the loss of her people.
