“How are you?” my great-aunt asks, pouring tea from a big clay pot.
She looks at me with curiosity; a wall of dim sum steamers between us.
I want to tell her about the woman who broke my heart.
But I know “How are you?’’ means
“Tell me how you are in the least controversial way.”
Her chopsticks clink against her bowl, and I am reminded of how easily it could
shatter. My dad once told me not to be a bull in a china shop.
“Go delicately; watch where you step.”
A bull, a mantis, and a gay girl walk into an Asian restaurant
The Western part of me is screaming. I want to tear
through the table—turn it upside down with my
horns.
This is the part of me that wants chaos and blood.
The part I keep hidden.
My great-aunt pours us more tea, and I notice the watercolor stems on the pot—
how they’re as thin and papery as her veins.
If the bull is let loose, it would tear right through her.
Go delicately; watch where you step.
“How are you?” she asks. I rein in the bull, pat its grizzly head. Leaning into its
neck, I whisper, not every place is your battleground.
Here, I must move softly; an Asian mantis gliding through a china store.
“I’ve been stressed,” I say, without going into detail.
This is my way of being authentic while causing the
least pain.
The bull squirms in its seat. I picture it charging
across the restaurant—shards of glass in my lap,
bloodstains on the tablecloth.
In a rush of panic, I check on my aunt.
The bull sits quietly in a corner, breathing down her neck.
Not every place is your battleground…
And so, we lay our pieces across the table like carefully chosen mahjong tiles.
“This is the only way to make it work,” says Mantis, taking a bite of stir-fried cabbage.
“Can you truly connect without showing your full self?” asks the bull.
I don’t know.
But I’ve been doing it my whole life.
The upcoming poem won 3rd prize for Hammond House’s International Literary Contest.
My parents’ house
My parents’ house is a time capsule
buried deep underground.
The furniture is intact;
my sling bag, a preserved fossil,
exactly where I left it.
At first glance, it looks like
time cannot touch anything here.
Then I notice spots where
the light got in:
new lines on my parents’ faces,
Grandma’s protruding veins.
It’s as if time seeped in
through the gaps and cracked them
at half the speed –
which is to say, my parents’ house
is also a time machine.
My family sits in the living room,
flipping through memories
that aren’t mine.
Leaving home is taking
rusty kitchen scissors
and cutting your own face
out of the photo albums.
‘‘There’s still time to make more,’’
says my aunt, placing a hand on my
shoulder. She calls me by the name
I buried in the backyard at eighteen.
There are some things time cannot touch.
My parents’ house is a time capsule
and a time machine.
The road that takes me away
carves a new one down my
mother’s face.
Her wrinkles run together
as she scrunches her nose –
a map of all the places
she’s been without me.
vThe house calls out from the rear window.
It sits unchanging at the end of the road
till distance swallows it –
a time capsule buried into the horizon.
At first glance, it looks like
time cannot touch anything here.
But it can,
and it does.
