they say love yourself more, as if it’s easy like flipping on a switch in the bedroom
and looking around to see how lovely the objects inside of you are.

the glass side table clumsily polished,
like the screen of my eyes reflecting someone’s transformed image
as it passes through and turns,
a little scratched on the corner.

the lights inside you will glow and show your true self
as if your true self is not also an object that takes in the years of
being told something else.
take down the posters that keep you covered
as if it doesn’t also peel away the paint and walls to expose your skeleton.

here is the vastness of my room,
the loveliness of my true self,
the hollowed chamber of a chest that burns,
fallen over objects,
awaiting the switch.

The dusty lampshade hung crookedly
as if peering into the next room in anticipation.
Down the hallway were three empty rooms and one wall scuffed where the remote shattered into pieces.

Above her bed used to be a dark spot where she pressed with her little finger
night after night
to quiet the breaking cups, the slamming doors, the shrill, the wordless, the maddening…

When father stopped sleeping
and mother’s slight figure disappeared completely,

She wandered into the backyard, cobblestone steps sizzling like coals in summer,
put her legs in the green pool,
that climbed with moss and grey spume, frothing,
And touched Ophelia’s reflection through the abyss.

Grandma’s house was a hollow cinder block.
In the front yard stood a lone pear tree that bore blushing pink teardrops year round.
Every night magnolias bloomed like clockwork, pirouetting inside on light feet
to chase away stale sickness,
soothing us when Ông Cố barked at the rattling chain fence,
his voice walking with heavy coughs.

Even on New Year’s when we patted lipstick on our cheeks and mouths,
bright red like our silk dresses,
And danced in the cement front yard around spider web cracks.
He barked like an engine backfiring, frustrated and rusting from the inside out.
He was red too, all water and darkness.

We slept on woven mats atop concrete beds
inside a mesh shroud of Jupiter’s storm cloud.
Heat suspended over us, a bog of stagnation in the brick bathroom
breeding fish and algae, our bathwater aquarium in bloom with larvae,
mosquitoes never not pregnant and full of our blood.

Yet still we survived the nights and gathered to watch the morning sun
wide eyed, heads tucked in grandma’s soft lap,
chewing on our tear drops,
the yelling in the next room withering away.

inside my professor's mailbox is
a blue journal.
  his stomach is turning on the red eye to California.
in the spring i make an A
from 150 pages of longing for a ghost.
-
inside of me at 5, there were
pinworms gnawing,
ropes of curled tails squirming around
  some gnarled beads coated
  in rust
and i cried opals on the nights i could hear them chew
right through.
inside of me were dreams of nothing.

I listened to birdsongs from my bed,
swimming out from a cloud of foam and *****,
and peeled back the flattened hair against my cheek.
Outside there was a cacophony of light:
illuminated leaves, the glimmer of pollen lazily drifting,
my sister’s hair, a reflecting pool of black, catching dust in the wind.

Last night I cried myself awake and fell into a bottle,
shoving my red mouth full of sleep and trying to find a path away
from where I had left my mother’s yelling
and my father’s knuckles against the bedroom door.

After it had quieted, I circled aimlessly around the house,
dodging the skittering shadows of insects
and barbed wire slinky ringlets.
Toys left askew mobilizing in a thundering sea,
my arms like anchors, me, the ship adrift.

In the last hour of the night I closed my eyes and traced
all the spots and veins, a webbing of purple and orange.
Wondering what my grandfathers’ felt as the last ounce of them slipped out at Buôn Ma Thuột,
asking their ghosts to hold me together,
my breath in shredded ribbons,
my soul whisked away.

i wear yellow and stare at planes
folding themselves into downy blue.
if i crash too, let the headline read:
icarus loved the sun
just as his father loved him
(but when the waves caught his body
he returned to his mother's embrace)

on the phone is a small voice.
my father calls my mother by her first name-
a title he reserves for when the world stops turning.

he is 18 hours ahead, sobbing to his wife
in a past day, and i can see his tears
dripping off his chin onto his lap,
smeared with blood and bile.
"he left us, thi,
my big brother."

her eyes flutter, she remains still and hesitant,
like ripe fruit trembling in fear of squall,
"he went happy, you were with him"
sybilline phrases or wishful-thinking prayers
echoing in his crumbling cavern heart.

he comes home the next week,
wearing his dead brother's jacket as if it were
a second skin he wishes he could live in.
he pulls it tight around, even though we are inside.

his hands are so gnarled, the knuckles of his fingers
like oak tree rings.
when he sees me looking at my own inherited dry palms and ashen wrinkles,
touching the life line to my wrist,
he presses the bark to my face
and says nothing.

although, not the exalted mythological
constellation
of the hunter orion, so proud
or cygnus' impressive wingspan
you are still clusters of stars.

but i am the light wondering if my
flickering
is in reality, darkness, left over.
my bright reaching everywhere and nowhere
all at once.

a cold, a fish, a baseball.
i can catch a snowflake on my burning tongue.
i can catch a falling star searing through the sky, a sudden **** in the night.
i can catch you curled around a phone-call.
it's past three and the wish i made from our bed
smothers itself to death on
some field in Nebraska.

i saved the unmarked bottle for the day after
when i came back to the destruction left by the hurricane of your wrath.
i could hear the clinking of glass shards you'd swept away and the whisper of a pale shadow where our picture hung the night before.

the house was empty.
i sat in the vacuum of our bedroom turning twenty stones in my hand.

one by one they fell into me like i was the bottom of a lake and they were finding home again.
we sank together in solitude,
the ebb and flow of water churning sleep songs and darkness.

at the bottom i saw colorless fish,
their bodies slack and immobile.
scales unreflecting,
like peachflesh forgotten under the sun.
only skin and seasickness.

i saw myself awake, wide eyed, entangled
in wet sleeping clothes,
fingers reaching and withdrawing,
mouth opening and closing, resigned to drown

and i saw you:
a mirage
a blurry refraction
vibrating and dreamlike
you scooped me to shore, laughing all the while.
your hand reached into my stomach
and skipped the stones into the horizon ahead.

I keep peeling off my face and
throwing the skin into the earth
hoping the ritual of burying
can flower a new layer upon me.
All smooth and poreless.
Erased in all the ways I've been taught to long for,
yet somehow retaining features
that some ******* corporation has spoonfed
generations of us into loving.

is named
for her practice:
she cannibalizes her lover to nourish her offspring.
Lives until their hatching
at which point she too is consumed for their lives.

You always thought it was beautiful that something could sacrifice so much.

When you dug yourself into the body of my father and tore apart
his entire being,
how could you know that I watched?

How could you know that when
I bit into your fingertips, calloused from toil,
I savored the flickering second of your breath?

there is some forest
where our bones grow
trunks larger than the sum of our dreams,
roots deeper than our family trees.
scattering leaves.
    green. you at 15.
    orange. me at 25.
    crushed into crisps.
-
what hands can
reach inside of me
to find heavy jars of blood, once
filled with honey.
-
in february, i cried and blamed it on the dust scattering.
i, too, blew away in the wind.
little pieces of me crumbling on the streets of carolina.

the seeing eye can predict movement of the oceans,
turning of scattered stardust,
silence on the moon.

my two eyes watch the spinning of
his red pen, pointed
while the rattling chamber-room of his mouth
collapses.
  coiling harder, the spring tightens around
the cold pit of my stomach.
burning already, a sunspot.

when the second hand stops its revolution,
my two eyes melt
into the sea.

I grew inside of you,
inheriting your black hair and high cheeks.
Your mischievous mouth and sharp tongue,
cutting men into slivers.
Your lofty laughter rises as they turn the other way in shame.

I survived outside of you,
two months too early.
A fragile ember, latching onto you like tinder.
I took your strong legs and boyish stance
long strides on a path neither of us could see well.

I have your blood and your breath and your life.
Clones and clones of mitochondria.

Yours and mine, we
are each other.

But Mother, you cannot live in me,
as I did in you.
My skin is hot and burning,
my spark now a blaze.

Even the wind of your laugh
And water of your blood,
I will boil and consume until it is all vapors and dust.

i.
i keep score of
a million impacts eaten by the hole
of my missing heart.
quietly chewed, faithfully tallied,
winning and losing a hollow game.
like counting craters
on the dark side of the moon.

ii.
what do i wait for?
serendipity? inevitability?
hastened by recklessness and a prayer
that you may witness me flying
toward the sun-- seeking icarus' ashes
in a blue sky
and a blue sea.
send love to my father, who sought to
raise and keep me well.
who feared too much,
and lived too little.

iii.
what hurts?
nothing. everything.
two perfect misalignments.
i'm the greatest kind of awful (and that's fine).

a pallid fog crawls from beneath your door,
cold and slick.
sweat in winter.
the creaks of your bed springs mumble secrets to each other--
counting the morse code of your shifting weight.
    how many trickling beads have you laid?
    round pearls
    flatten against your purple palm.
he will not hear the clicks in the distance
even close,
the mist muffles waves.