One night, after the ‘Star Spangled Banner’ played

and the multicolored bars lit up the television,

the room filled with a comforting low crackle of static,

Mrs Alexander startled Dana and me, catching us

sleeping side by side – Dana

(who once taught me how to French kiss)

using my arm like a pillow, her face

resting on my shoulder, one leg

draped over mine, curled into me,

both of us lying the way I’d seen couples

do it in the movies, blue smoke the only thing missing,

a Marlboro in my lips, burnt down to the filter.

Lucky Money

It is 1971.

At Willie Lum’s Hong Kong Restaurant

I am four years old and this is my very first job:

carry the steaming tea by the bamboo handle,

deliver it to Willie Lum’s ancient mother.

It is much more difficult than a simple balancing

of heat over distance. There’s the back kitchen, gleaming

in chrome, knives, the crackling of fluorescent lights.

There’s the old man at the sink strangling the dishes,

the dead look he has for children, that bang

of pots in the slosh of the tub, and the back door,

how to squeeze past its riveted metal sheets

to the most difficult of all,

the bridge, the plank –

that weathered twelve-foot board which spans

the ledge of the restaurant’s back door

to the porch of his mother’s trailer and below that,

seven feet down, chained on a leash of stainless steel –

the bullmastiff, gnashing its teeth, its larynx

growling from the deep pit of midnight,

the nerves of my skin aware of the bats

skimming the oak trees, walnuts

forming in cerebral shells – and I walked out

into the universe, the frightening unknown beauty of it,

my hair turned electric. This is where I learned to walk the line

over bristling fur, the rough lungs of a language

calling up from the depths below, all I must ignore

if I want to cross over, a boy of four with a pot of tea

for an old woman buried in afghans, lit by Chinese lanterns,

an ancient one who gives me red and gold envelopes,

who says Lucky money. No spendee. Lucky money.

On the Flight to Alamosa, Colorado

At 10,000 feet, the lights of Denver

fade, pilots check their gauges.

The Beechcraft’s engines thrum my ears

as elevation and cabin pressure block out

passengers in conversation behind me,

my view a distorted globe,

my reflection in it moonless, culpable.

Once again, I’m in the belly of a C-130

with Fiorillo’s and Hathaway’s and Jax’s

silence, cold rifles in our hands,

the Highway of Death guiding us

to the airstrip at Anaconda, 210

bullets sleeping on my chest.

We haunt the streets of Balad

at midnight, kicking in doors

and raiding houses, separating the men

from women and children, flex-cuffing

wrists and sandbagging their heads,

searching block by block, house to house,

in sewage sumps, animal stalls, sacks of flour,

searching for all we have left behind –