Everybody needs a Ken,

the song chirps on repeat.

Already I walk where I don’t exist.

You propelled yourself, wobbly cannonball,

down bruise-colored hallways,

not acting ladylike at all,

ignored the preening at the makeup stations

to jump spasmodically in place,

wanted to bake pretend cupcakes in the fake ovens

so you could eat them all yourself.

Still.

How can I teach you not to ask for the pink cars,

the thin threads,

the hierarchy of blondes,

the sell to be skinny

without your wanting it all anyway?

I can’t promise I’d write a poem

if you were a boy

jumping boots first into a G.I. Joe land,

staring down the eyes of cannons that shoot

but never kill.

In the end, whose resistance will you take on?

Love that gives my life meaning,

so beautiful I can scarce believe you’re cast from me at all—

I am so sorry

for the plastic worlds I helped bring you into.

Broken Things

Let’s call him O.

He was loud,

wore his hair long,

wore all black,

banged his head,

gave zero fucks before giving zero fucks was a thing.

O. was an Asian but a bad Asian, but then again back then there were

only bad Asians

so that shit was redundant to everyone but us.

His given name he never told us

said we couldn’t pronounce it anyway.

The whispers said:

we should be nice to him cuz his daddy beats him.

O. turned his arm upside down once

to show burn scars shaped like cigarettes—

then winked at me.

O. made life hell for almost everyone except for me—

looked at me the way a pit bull who has decided to defend kittens might.

Those times I would want to ask him more but didn’t.

One night O. found a lightbulb in a dead lot in the dark

threw it so hard that that burnt-out bulb spun end over end

’til it met something harder than itself and broke.

Before the end of its ellipse we were running

short fits of breath puffing

O. making monster noises.

He could not see if I was laughing or crying

in the dark.

Decades later I travel and read poems,

thankful to strangers

who like me because they don’t know me yet.

Kids once bullied by kids like O.

have grown up to create avant-garde hot dog bars,

wax their mustaches,

drink shit you can’t even pronounce.

O., we assume his story is sad because it started that way.

True story: two Japanese men scuba dive for a wife, a daughter,

lost five years ago to a tsunami.

They dive, and they dive, and they dive again,

trying to find a place beyond hope.

They are at their best

when the ones they love

can’t see.

We’re talking about O., of course,

how none of us can predict

even what we know.

And what of the kitten?

Well let’s just say

if you are a parent

yet the one thing that might make you special is that you are a poet—