Off-brand chips and bean soup, again
Someone told me the skies here are blue
Today my tea is grey. The commute
Roars quiet, like an ostrich
Like a gas top and saucepan.

I taste red beans on my tongue
That I brought from my mother's house
Back home I have a chicken. My wife
My three daughters, my son
The train is red, red and white

I will call them again, tonight.
My knuckles are dry. My shoes are clean
Lint-rolled suit, crisp tie
Sharp and clean and white shirt
White and my red, red beans.

This is a love letter
To the African-American community.
Black, if you wish,
Or simply “neighbor”.
To the African-American community-
My people would not be here if it were not for you.
Here as in alive,
Not as in the states,
Because we came to the states to be alive,
Something that would not have been possible back home,
But you helped us stay that way,
When our trades were not accepted
By soft-palmed,
American-accented
People of the US.
When we came here to escape death and oppression,
We were welcomed not by the blonde-haired, blue-eyed people we saw in the advertisements from the war,
We did not step off of the boat and into the arms of the benevolent angels we had heard of,
No,
We came to America and found you.
African-American community,
At the time,
You hardly had a home to give,
And yet you offered it to us when we had none.
Your culture was ravaged by war and slavery,
And yet you encouraged us to preserve our’s.
African-American community,
My people came here with no English and no education,
And to the residents here,
The two are synonymous.
My family,
Though skilled in trades handed down by generations of people in our tribe,
Father to son,
And mother to daughter,
Our traditions were passed down,
But when we arrived in the new world,
We were like babes in arm,
Hardly knowing how to walk.
African-American community,
This is a thank you,
For taking my people by the hand and pressing their fingers into the soil,
Teaching us how to coax life out of it.
Teaching us how to translate our language of terracing in the mountains
To sowing in the fields,
When none would take us for work,
Season after season
Of my family hushing the mother language off the tongues of our children
So that they would sound less foreign,
More American,
Black community,
You taught my family how to prepare for a blistering Texas heat,
When they were built to withstand an Eastern chill.
Black community,
You showed my people what it was like
To build a life from the ground,
The strange,
Alien,
American ground,
Up.
You took my people and led them out of the darkness of oppression and corruption
And into the light of the real American dream,
The one where people who have been beaten into the earth can rise up like a Phoenix.
Black community,
You showed us what to do with the dirt and the sandy loam
Until we built upon it churches,
Homes,
Harvested from it sustenance,
And within it,
Buried our dead.
Black community,
This is a love letter,
Because love is the only reason I can think of
As to why you had mercy on my battered, broken people,
Accepting our calloused hands in thanks,
As we had nothing else to offer.
Neighbors,
This is a thank you,
From the small, inconsequential non-natives,
Round and sturdy,
And the savage language with unfamiliar roots,
From my people,
With un-American eyes,
Coal-black and slanted,
Thank you,
On behalf of my ancestors for the actions of your’s,
Neighbors,
Thank you.
Your people were not the ones that struck the beads and herbs from our hair,
Snatched the language from our lips,
And took the ribbons tied to our shoulders and wrapped them ‘round our throats,
Choking the accent out of our mouths,
Neighbors,
That was not you.
Within God’s walls,
Moj Boze,
Ti Bok,
The ones built on the ground you brought us to,
We are told not to condemn the descendants of those who hurt us,
But to praise that of those who did not.
So here I am,
Neighbors,
Writing you a love letter
Because all I have to offer
Is my thanks.
My people,
Though Americanized
And void of the language and traditions that they were told to abandon,
Stand strong today,
And I,
A woman,
Just as stout and ungraceful as the tribe that bore me,
I am educated.
I not only learn English,
But I master it.
I earn my money and I keep it,
No man takes it from me,
Or refuses to sell me land because I am unmarried,
No government can remove me
And ****** me into a camp
Or a foreign country where I will not be a bother,
And although my people have been stripped of their name and placed under the color-coded category of person
On the spectrum that everyone seems to abide by,
You,
Neighbors,
Stood by us.
Thank you.

It is not my story to tell:
Languishing dreams in the midst of barbed wire fences,
Fearless laughter,
We add lemon, chile powder and salt to this border.

They carry these stories,
Heavy as a sack filled with indignities,
Weighty, like your grandmother’s advice,
Cumbersome, like this daily mental displacement.

I have not bought big things as of lately,
In my mind I plan my exits,
I constantly check my relocation fund,
“What if” is a constant in my lexicon.

I often break in tears at the sound of an immigrant story,
My emotions become gallons of water:
broken and splashed by the boots of immigration officers,
Little do they know, we are cacti:
Tough and our seeds also flourish post mortem.

I want to sing an immigrant song:
Less like butterflies who migrate,
But more like dislocated nations,
Collateral flesh, caught up in steel thorns.

Rest assured we will survive,
Like leaves of siempreviva,
Even after torn away from our stem,
We will grow our own roots:
Defiant, resilient, and with a stubborn willingness to belong.

We are you.

a community of wildflowers pretending to be roses.
befriending what we believe are better plants,
and covering themselves in lavender.
they dip their petals and spikes into ink,
and they pretend that they are feathers,
and with these feathers they pretend to be birds,
and being birds is the only way they feel free.
they are left uncared for and wilted down,
they are overlooked and thrown away,
they are called pests and flower killers.
but they are beautiful,
they are powerful and everpresent,
they are proof that no matter how much pulling them out,
cutting them down, and praying them away, wildflowers are here to stay.

you carry the burden of our histories on your shoulders,
not to repeat them but to know where we went
wrong to end up this way.

You carry the pride of our histories in your heart,
not to repeat them but to know someone's always cared,
and that it's our turn to care now.

इस बोझ को अकेले मत उठाना, इस ख़ुशी को बिखेरके चलना।

The capital’s streets weave around me

So tight that it almost looks like I’ve forgotten

but you can’t see what’s underneath

the ember of an emerald

Of vast green fields stretching as far as I can see

Of the white beads dripping down a 99

From the orange September sun



The capital’s buildings tower above me

So high no sun comes through

We seek it out

Like we’ve left it behind here or there

behind this building or that.



The capital’s people stare blankly

Not knowing their howiya from their how are you?

But we won’t hold it against them.

Their blue suits

White shirts

And red socks.



I’ll keep my colour scheme, thank you.

My fields

My ice cream

And my sun.



All that remind me of home.

Now years later,
Walking down those rubble and dirt,
Which creak in agony,
I am reminded of that innocent face,
Which once washed cold ashore,
On a ****** dreadful day,
When the world stood still.

When my hands were the size of apricots
my tongue always jumping through hoops
as I read words that were dusty
a book covered in pretty plastic
from the local library that smelled like a grandfather
if I had a grandfather
I read Corduroy, the story of a stuffed bear
in the Laundromat
the sun sweltering outside
melting the story with me
like a swirly ice cream cone on the side step of an apartment
or the slushy ingested combined with
the acid you were so prone to tasting in your throat
reflux, like a memory that just won’t go away
leaving the residue of remnants you wish your brain would just spit up
this ordinariness of abandonment
feelings washed away like the mud stains on your uniform shirt tumbling in the washer
the soap bubbles punching the glass window in unison with all the rest; a cleansing of spirits
a lot of people go to church
but for those that can’t afford it, the laundry is heaven with a vending machine
I felt for the stuffed animal rejected for missing a button
because I knew children with trembling knuckles
turned into adults that got lost in the escalators of the world’s mall
wandering ghosts with perpetual uncertainty whether they should
buy the coffee set or the patent leather shoes that will balm over the calluses of their feet
in the loudness of the fans redistributing hot hair
I was in limbo, the rigid seat sticking to the back of my thighs like caramel
sweat almost hard to ignore if it wasn’t for the luster
of all the women inside, their shoulders broad like those I
only thought of in lumberjacks
burly burlap sacks over their shoulders
swapping stories of childbirth as frequently
as they ordered a pound of red liver chunks from the grocery store next door
like animatronics that learned to harvest a genuine laugh
their nail polish never fading despite the gruesome biting teeth of Clorox bleach
staining the skin on their hands
they were warriors, lost and unsure of in a world that didn’t look them square in the eye
much like those camo toy soldiers you won if you gave the machine a quarter
unwrapping it from its’ plastic cage, growling for the neglect of their maker
who decided not to give them pupils at all
senile wrestlers sometimes forgotten by children in the middle of the walkway
so that they could be stepped upon, accidentally
these women with their chocolate complexion and romantic gold hoops, accidental
unrecognized by their country, banished by their family
isolated in a land that shows mercy to those that only help themselves
no refugee whose blood could compare to oil
these women who weren’t missing any buttons
would congregate inside this Laundromat hoping to remove the stains
wishing that their clothes would stop smelling of unpaid labor
that they could stop calling home a box inside a closet of more stacked boxes
they can hear those around them, elbowing the walls like multiple hearts in a rib cage
the world glimpsing in for a second, just another spin rinse cycle
repeat until all color fades
I too find myself  stuck inside that Laundromat, I realize
except I know that I can leave, I know I can walk out with my book in tow
open the door and become another spectator if I wished
which is more than that poor toy soldier can say