Poetry

The first thing you need to know about me
is that I’m Vietnamese and in my house, love was never loud.

It didn’t echo down hallways.
It didn’t sound like “I’m proud of you.”
It didn’t look like hugs before school.

It sounded like oil popping in a pan at five in the morning.
It smelled like garlic and rice before the sun came up.
It looked like my mom already dressed for work while the rest 
of the world was still asleep.

When I was younger, I didn’t understand that.

I remember standing outside my elementary school, 
watching other moms kneel down to fix their kids’ jackets, 
kissing their foreheads before they ran off to class. 
I would adjust my own backpack straps and walk in quietly.

No hug.
No dramatic goodbye.
Just, “Have you eaten yet?” (in Vietnamese)

At the time, I thought something was missing.

Middle school made it worse. Sleepovers at friends’ houses 
where their parents said “I love you” before bed. Family movie nights, 
Instagram posts with matching Christmas pajamas 
and long captions about “my whole world.”

I would scroll and think, why doesn’t my family look like that?

But social media never shows you the silence 
after the camera stops recording.

What it didn’t show was my mom arriving in America 
with two suitcases and broken English.
What it didn’t show was her working double shifts.
What it didn’t show was her sitting at the kitchen table late at night, 
calculator in hand, whispering numbers under her breath.

My mom left Vietnam with no guarantee of success. 
She left her parents. Her siblings. Everything familiar.

And I was upset about hugs.

That realization didn’t hit me all at once.
It hit me in small moments.

Like coming home one afternoon, dropping my backpack on the floor, 
and smelling fried rice before I even turned the corner into the kitchen. 
On the counter sat a cold bottle of Mogu Mogu my favorite.

No note.
No speech.
Just food.

She walked past me and said, 
“I saw this at the store and thought you’d like it.”

And I just nodded.

Another morning, I was running late. 
Hair half done. Shoes untied. Annoyed at everything.
She slid a plate toward me and said, “Eat first.”

I said, “I’m not hungry.”
She looked at me and said, “Eat.”

That was it.

No “because I love you.”
No long explanation.

Just rice. Just fruit cut into perfect slices. 
Just a lunch packed anyway.

For years, I mistook quiet love for absence.
But Vietnamese love isn’t loud.

It’s practical.
It’s consistent.
It wakes up before you do.

It works overtime.
It buys you things it never had.
It asks, “Have you eaten?” instead of “How do you feel?”
Not because it doesn’t care,
but because feeding you is caring.

And one day, it clicked.
Love in my house was never missing.
It was just speaking a different language.

A language of sacrifice.
A language of survival.

A language that sounds like early alarms and grocery bags 
and tired eyes that still stay up to wait for you to come home.

I stopped comparing my family to picture-perfect captions.

I started noticing details.

The way she always cuts fruit for me without asking.
The way she saves the better portion for my plate.
The way she never buys things for herself but insists I should.

That’s love.
Not loud.
But steady.

And maybe that’s even stronger.

Now, when she asks, “Have you eaten yet?”
I hear what she really means.

She means, “I care.”
She means, “I’m here.”
She means, “I love you.”

And I finally learned how to hear it.

So yes , the first thing you need to know about me 
is that I’m Vietnamese.
And because of that, I learned something early:
Love doesn’t have to be loud to be real.
Sometimes it smells like garlic at five in the morning.
Sometimes it sounds like oil in a pan.
Sometimes it looks like sacrifice.

And now, my job is simple.
To work hard.
To go to college.
To become the best version of myself.

Because she gave me the best version of herself.

I stare into the deep black eyes 
	of my dog, intense, and the eyes of a small god stare back.

The house creaks and settles in the morning.
	We have this in common.

We carry our ancestry within us wherever we go,
	and there is not a damned thing to do about it.

Is it better to pray for healing, or for courage and wisdom 
to face the facts that we need healing.

You get what you get, nothing more to be said about it.
	Unless you want to say more, I’m listening.

At 3 AM the moonlight catches the small brown and black figurine of a rabbit, molded and baked by Lenca Indian hands in the manner of their Central American ancestors for a thousand years or more.  I lie on my sofa and stare into the eyes of this other small god, the rabbit alive, swirls in the design breathing in the moonlight.  She whispers “patience.”  Sleep sneaks in, hidden by the shadows.

the six of us in a downpour
nighttime, late March
lantern remaining lit on the front steps
our guide, Eric, tells us of eight or more known séances
connecting to lost sons
seventeen years in this home—best of your life
laughs for hours in the kitchen and parlor
light on your five-foot-two silhouette
outline witnessed on a shade right of the door
I glance to find you
nearly 200 years after your prologue
forty minutes of tales we rid our umbrellas
questions, wows, tisks
no one else on these cobblestones
across South 8th Street a light flickers above the door 
Blake and Victoria pose for a photograph
frightened from a thump in the living room
yet you do not show yourself
rather admire the children from a distance

Part I

I find my understanding on the firmness
of the ground. Sometimes, my son and I sit 
outside, overgrown grass kissing
our calves. It matters less then, everything else
matters less, I mean the brokenness of the brain
with all the pain or worry, because my body,
because I grew his body inside my body, 
because I was the first to know him, 
because I knew him sooner than I
thought it possible to know.
I woke up one morning, and just knew. There was pain
in my breasts. There was the heaviness pushing me
towards the earth. And I knew him. And I told him, 
through the channels of our connected cells, 
I know you. I love you.

I imagine he was created because he needed to be;
he appeared in my womb in a spark. He took the blood
and oxygen and water and made himself a body. He placed
himself between the synapses firing in my brain, and 
modeled himself a spirit, in the shape of a boy;

he would tell me that he has ghost friends
who try to get him into mischief.

Go, I tell him. We are all the stars and the stars are us.
Trouble loves us all the same.

Sometimes, I know what he’s thinking
without him saying a word.

Part II

When my son was born, I sat alone in the hospital room,
the pain of aduantas worse than the pain from my incision;
they call it aduantas in Irish. In English, there is no one word,
no passable way to describe the unease of being
in an unfamiliar place with unfamiliar people.

We choose language even though it fails us over and over.  
I’ve chosen to try to tell a story, when no words
could speak to the ache in my bones.
Listen: the wind tells it better.

In New York, I know the way time moves. The odd, warm,
February day that smells of spring. The rain every year 
on my birthday in April. Sticky, hot summer afternoons 
and leaves that beg, plead to fall.

Certain moments have carved out a permanent home
in my memory. March in the year 2002, I sat in a coffee shop 
on Chambers Street, and I remember the
purplish red of the sunset at 7:00 pm.

And there are moments even now, I remember
that evening: my body, my book, the glare of light 
against the window. It means something, and I will
never know the word to tell you what.

Part III

The wind tells it better. When you’re stuck in traffic
and the lane next to you is slowly moving, and you 
see the individual pebbles jump and fall against the street.
When the rain falls and the ground accepts the offering. 

At my grandfather’s funeral I cried quietly. I never spoke a word.
The last time he would see me, and I stood up to leave,
he grabbed my hand and wouldn’t let go.
The machines kept him from speaking.

But if he had spoken, I wouldn’t have remembered what he said.
I remember the feel of his hand in mine, his skin telling me, Goodbye,
I love you, I will see you again, but I wish it could be sooner. 

There is something they don't tell you about all the vows.
Sometimes "for worse" comes first; sometimes it's a thread
sewn throughout. It's not always this clear block of time;
waking up in the morning you feel it: Oh, today it will be for 
worse, and for maybe a few months–
no, sometimes it's the day after your wedding and you
are alone in your house listening to the rain. Sometimes you make a
mistake so quick and beautiful that there is no
urge to forgive. Sometimes you sit quietly while
your honeymoon disappears like smoke in the air.
 
I have a husband again now. Sometimes it's a week
after your wedding and your husband can barely move.
Sometimes it's a week after your wedding and you
are making plans for the next trip to the 
hospital and how to rearrange
the living room so that your husband will not trip
and fall over all
this life

Tart orange juice dribbles down,
it slips between my open lips
searching for a place to rest
between coffee and toothpaste.

Such cursive undulation
of damp drops are impeded
by a sleeve, where wandering thought
of prosciutto forms its nest.

Mellifluous screams / defiant
jazz tickles ear folds with hunger –
hunger. Wild carrots, curling
parsley, honey’s sweet sting,

each flirtation the mouth tastes
ripe and rotten, mental collapse,
crude like sprouting potatoes.
I tuck a napkin under my thigh.

Hunger, my melted will, my aching
agony erupts, help me –  help wipe
my mouth, my tongue, my snot, and 
tears. I find no rest in this place.