Words in a Quiver--maybe that was too esoteric

NaPoWriMo update: I am Robin-Hooding internet in my apartment so my poem posts might come as weekly installments from a coffeehouse somewhere. Weekly installments of mediocrity. Be excited.

Backdated 4/3

4/3/11 It Gets Better Bitter

Some time in the near future,

A little Korean-American boy with his Scandinavian-American mom

(either Swedish or Norwegian, depending on the year)

will look in the mirror, both in their new red turtlenecks and say

“We look just the same!”

Later, he might ask her what she said

when other kids on the playground

called her mean names like

chink or slant

she’ll smile sadly, and answer as best she can.

Some time between puberty and

becoming a man,

he’s going to sit in his basement

working up the courage to slice into his

wrists with his dad’s scalpel--

endure the pain like a Samurai

(he doesn’t know what the Korean equivalent is),

let the lowest common denominator color

drain out sorrow he can’t understand.

He’ll never work up the courage.

Some time in college, he’ll tell a pretty German-Irish-French-American girl

“I’m basically white, when it comes down to it”

in a misguided attempt to get in her pants.

This will fail both immediately and

more profoundly, years later, when an Asian-American Studies class

shows him history is more than dates and dead white people.

New friends who look like him will

help him develop a pride of being, hope for a future.

He’ll make friends, influence people,

grasp a new American Dream of achievement,

walk tall until an ignorant old woman asks

loudly and slowly:

“DO YOU SPEAK ENGLISH?”

Backdated 4/2

Fuck You and You Stupid Bangs

There was that day we all died

(no cult bullshit, mind you)

when the make-shift wooden sidewalk

above

the

abyss

above, the pipe construction

that carries our waste into the

Mighty Mississippi

We fell, together,

finally united

a congress with air and impending doom

toward those pipes

carrying our shit and our toilet paper and

our pets we got tired of,

the remnants of the wood walkway falling with us

Above us, pigeons circled,

in our last seconds, we thought they were

startled by our noise but they had seen this coming--

they had sensed it for weeks.

Above us, they circled cooing a

melodic “fuck you” since this was

their sidewalk first.

NaPoWriMo 2011

I'm doing the NaPoWriMo Challenge again. It looks like linebreaks are going to come and go on this site. Maybe this is blogspots way of keeping me from posting poetry at work. I'm kicking it off with a poem about snuggles:

She likes it best when he

holds her tight, sleeping,

holds her to him like

she’s a handle in a storm, a

tree rooted in soil and history.

She likes it best when he

breathes her in, inhales

her scent and murmurs

prayers spoken in tongues of slumber,

holds her close again.

Rain plays rhythmic on the window

pane only sometimes,

she wonders what he dreams about.

He hides it best when he

sleeps, mind at rest, words

form and he smiles, thinking:

“I’ll squeeze the life from you.

I’ll squeeze the life from you and eat it.”

And then Jon lost all his blog-followers

TO: Politacally-Minded White People/Well-Intentioned White Liberals/Most Christians
FROM: Jon/The Cold Shoulder/Guy who's been called Chinese, Dog-eater, Slant, etc.

I actively associate your actions and identity with Sarah Palin. How does that taste?

A Thursday Poem

Bully w/ Blue Eyes & a Gun.

Dear Fong,
I bet right now you're wishing you had been gay
and bullied
and killed yourself--
made the choice to die--
because maybe then
Fong Lee would be in the papers,
your tormentors might see justice,
and Mr. Sulu would have to remember which face he wears first.
I bet right now you're wishing you had a closet to hide in,
to protect you from the bullets,
lock out Hatred with a badge and a gun--
but you can't take your face off
and bulleyes are too often brown eyes.

You didn't have a choice in dying--
there are no hotlines for kids who like to ride their bikes with friends
and your roommate didn't film it when who you really were--
your colors--
drained out of you from thirteen holes
onto North Minneapolis.

Banana, Split (revised)

She knows all the words to Weezer,

was Go-Go Yubari for Halloween

and, in her white-washed mind, her chipmunk cheeks are the

the hottest you’ve ever seen

dressing like a school girl-dragon lady-

ex-Asian hyping the exotic East,

Hangul hurts her hands

so she settles for (what she’s pretty sure is) kanji

Reclaims her hanguk saram handle

But failure by any other name

still reeks like rotting from the inside out--

diseased with something awful, incurable

no matter how many yellow-fevered topicals

coat that vapid pout.

Hitchhiking--no, sidestepping--toward self discovery

or identity-reclamation all for popularity--

she breaks a sweat, remains half a hemisphere away--

grows Madame Butterfly wings

but stays grounded, West of anything worth finding,

blathering on to white boys about how much she’s already found,

pukes out a drunken, broken hangul greeting

and doesn’t understand that

solidarity does not make us friends.

She’s unable to speak--no, unable to be,

all her heart’s sob stories about hidden bloodlines

language lost, and guilty conscience

all turn to pathetic cries for sympathy.

The day can’t come soon enough

when she brings those bloodlines out of hiding,

lets her wrong turns pool beneath her

and still can’t tell

if our stories run the same color.