# data[].attributes.body
My Bowl

My bowl, my gift to myself

holds the tea I discard

hot leaves and liquid, accumulating and cooling

My bowl is energetic on the inside

but quiet on the outside

is charming and gracious

even though I gave it a dull job

(to receive mess

to hold something with no further use)

My bowl works while I rest.

One day the glaze makes a sound

Like the when water hits ice

and I worry

the bowl isn't happy

Later in my dark apartment

The bowl is dry, my apartment is cool

I hear the bowl crackle again

I worry I am asking too much of it

I want my bowl to be with me forever

I will go easy on my bowl

Let it rest while I work

# data[].attributes.body
right of passage

because the wind strides
and wafts alongside
the ruffles in your sleeves

because the creases
pull apart their praying folds
to breathe

because the lines are
ORIGAMI FOR DUMMIES
and the iron
is at your mothers'

because the button
holes kiss each other
in the laundry hamper, anyway

because your chin balances
atop the collar,
and your whole face
is gulped up when it flips

# data[].attributes.body
because father walked to the restaurant kitchen with a leather briefcase
because mother wiped the yellowing drool of another woman's baby
because grandmother lay in her bed of old newspapers
because grandfather loved another grandchild more for being there every sunny weekend
because we left on a plane with paper boxes and rope, tied and retied

# data[].attributes.body
The world begins here
in an abstracted shape
of seahorses            of yesterday

The world begins here
not fully formed yet already
flying out of my field        of imagination

The world begins here
in the burn I wanted
to call warmth
in the memory of my dad remembering
how houses had names
and his was a lizard in the sun

The world begins here
and in the flesh
of others

The world begins here
over:exposed
under:my eyelids

# data[].attributes.body
Presence and Absence

The world begins here
the human gesture toward not just
what we want, but what we notice
Airplane
Car Mom Sky
What strikes us as possibly true.

Out of every experience, certain aspects
rise forward to present themselves
the airplane moves across the sky
car across road
mom toward me
dog toward me, too

We can't notice what isn't there
We can't world what isn't gestured
We can't begin what isn't experienced

# data[].attributes.body
Instead of I love you

I find my favourite fruit, ripe yellow mangoes,

cut, peeled, laid out on the kitchen counter

Instead of I’m sorry

You flop onto my bed with the cat in your arms,

ask if I want to get bubble tea

Instead of I miss you

I send you a video of a frog
with a tiny, flower petal hat

basking in the warm yellow sun

Instead of I forgive you

You dig out my favorite oolong tea, tucked

in the shadows of your pantry from years, and years ago

Instead of I was wrong

I write a poem about you, hide it deep in dog eared pages

let time fade the ink off the page

# data[].attributes.body
The world begins here

in your tired, hopeful, hungry mind, formed

between the rivulets of sweat and the pitch black craters

where your mother rescued you

from a spotless white room

filled you with her stories, and her mother’s stories, and her mother’s mother’s stories,

and though this spiral winds far into the distance, somehow

I am holding the end of the thread in my hand

I feed it into my spindle,

And I try to weave a shelter, a resting

point in the weary history of living and living and living,

I press my foot down again and again and again

I look up and find I am still running

# data[].attributes.body
Why I Finally Learned English

because we didn't have to queue for cheese or for plums

because I had never seen clothes like the ones worn by the mannequins that I had also never seen

because it was a giddy thing, the way choice could be as much trouble as necessity

because people would ask how I was without expecting an answer, letting me swim underneath their expectations, collecting their discards

because it was easier to capitulate to the language of abundance than to keep hauling the language of loss

because I ran out of things to read

# data[].attributes.body
The world begins here:
my parents' bed
in the old house
with orange shag carpet

Because Mom asked once, after a fight
how can you not know we love you
Because I left so young
thinking I had no home, stayed away
so long

# data[].attributes.body
lessons from bà nội

(một)

bà nội has a scar on her stomach as big as two hands:

it stretches across sagging skin

& shines silver in the kitchen light

on rainy days she liked to lift her shirt & show it to us

pressed our faces against it so we could breathe in incense & past trauma

held our sticky fingers to raised flesh & called it a lesson—

my cousins & i would always gather around her

the scar the only picture book we could afford

she would tell us how her mother used a rusty knife as retribution

for when her brother tripped & fell chasing after her—

she reminded us that an eye for an eye are the only words to grow up by

when i threw my sister to the ground in anger

i told mẹ that it too was a lesson

(hai)

when mẹ pulls my face against hers, presses angry fingertips into my red-blotched skin

she tells me that she is teaching me how to be a good daughter

grips tighter, teeth mashed together in anger, tells me i am ngu

she doesn’t want to be my mother anymore.

is this the lesson, mẹ?

if i tell myself enough times that i am not yours

i will not belong to this grief that perches upon my shoulders

if i suppress your blood in my veins

crack open my marrow & erase you out of my cells

will that stop my fists from curling inward in anger

& harbouring destruction in my lungs?

some days i wonder if bà nội too,

pulled mẹ’s face to her, branded red-hot anger into skin

& called it the deepest lesson of love

if bà nội ever chased mẹ around with a butcher’s knife

or slapped a wooden rod against her ass so hard that

it felt like lightening cleaving the sky & thunder rattling the earth

(ba)

bà nội grips my hand tight when we walk down the stairs to the airport

gives me a gummy smile as she presses a red envelope in my hand

pats my cheek & asks me what I am studying in school

i slam my teeth down—dam against the flood

did you know, i do not say,

Aristotle believed that storms were

the exhalations of clouds colliding with one another

i think you collided with rain clouds bà nội

i think mẹ is angriest when she is chasing storms

i think i only like the rain when it’s over

# data[].attributes.body
I Remember, after Joe Brainard: https://www.thetemzreview.com/isabella-wang-13.html

I remember      It takes more than one person to remember.
That’s why the word has
member in it —
a vestigial of thought, or a collective.

I remember     A time and a land and the process of forgetting
that wasn’t any time or
land I’ve lived in my lifetime
but I remember      Because the women
in my family had stories.

I remember     Stories
as a kind of land you arrived at
And I remember     Poetry
as both an immigration policy      and the destination that was a city
wrote me.