Listen carefully:

this is how

white people tell

you

that “you can be anything you want as long as you work hard enough”

does not apply to

you

or

your

children.

If you forget,

they will apply

pressure

on the sidewalk,

in front of

witnesses.

Lily and David Chin,

in laundries and restaurants and in a brush factory,

worked all their lives to see their

son

murdered twice.

If ever

I

am to stand in front of a judge

to measure the dollar amount of

my

life

and he cannot decipher

what kind of man

I

am

how

I

will haunt history

I

will tell him

I

am what

I

always have been:

I

am a dead man.

Poem for Ahmed Al-Jumaili

The shower:

water looks like elongated beads of silver

each with a band of shifting rainbows at the top.

Those who shower before the sun comes out

only see this when they are late—

sunlight turning hyphens of water into the briefest art,

dying down the drain.

Twenty days ago it was ISIS and before that, them—

or rather, some form of us—

men, uniforms, twisting

tornadoes of smoke and fire

into the skies of Iraq.

You fled here, like my people did.

You took pictures of your first snowfall.

Usually seen only when enlarged for official Christian holidays,

made of construction paper,

the real thing falling now from the Texas sky:

frozen microscopic fingerprints.

No one knows why they shot you.

There are bullet holes.

There is blood.

There are myths about hundreds of words for snow,

if you lived your life

surrounded by it.

Why then are there not a hundred words for bullets,

for running into the aiming eyes we are taught are civilized,

meaning safety—

instead fleeing to this country made of

crosshairs.

I wish you a flurry of peace.

I wish you the slush avalanched forth from mourning.

I wish you justice, so thick

it covers this land all around us.

List of Notable Asian American Poets

On a clothesline: a constellation of lynched Chinamen.

Bleach,

then hang dry.

War

Deportation

Bombing

Chink

Refuge

Buddha:

for lexical repetition in a sestina.

Dudes who think they’re more Asian than us

because they married one of us.

White teachers in the hood

who don’t think Asians are oppressed enough

to need saving.

No sainthood without a headline.

No headline that needs a translator.

You don’t survive by putting to paper

what happens behind the restaurant’s doors to the kitchen.

The fortune is not the fortune, it’s the cookie.

Those who can eat will eat.

All the while wolves in gatekeepers’ clothing

check off boxes.

This is how we divide sheep.

467 / 500 (Asian Americans Are an Interrogation Waiting to Happen)

All Asian American fans will now be forced to show ID at basketball games to prove they are an authentic fan of basketball and not just jumping on a Jeremy Lin bandwagon. They will be required to pass a test with questions such as