Say WHAT?

—The word “ma” means six different things in Vietnamese, depending on the tone

Ma—ghost—even with no tone to fetter, it lives

Mà—but—say this like you’re laying it down

M—tomb or grave—curl it like a question mark

Mã—horse—start from the bottom, then go up, like ghetto dreams

Má—momma—the one I didn’t have to look up

Mạ—to plate—heavy, a stone too large for your hands, dropped in water

Vietnamese people have always been spoken word poets.

How you say it

is as important to the life of the word

as the word itself.

I.

Vocabulary

—With thanks to Guante

Maintenance, they called it.

Minimum wage to guide shopping carts

from parking lot to corral.

We lined those silver metal buggies

with red plastic-flap seats for infants

into rows of ten to twelve,

up to thirty if you were a team of two.

Keep at the push long enough,

those stacked trains would roll—

the hardest part was steering.

One winter, a fellow cart pusher confided in me during a lull

as we stood near the weak warmth of the rattling heat vent in the cart corral.

Like me, he was a nonwhite boy from a poor family.

Like me, his face was limestone and granite pressed tight together.

His eyes distant, he spoke of how much he missed his girlfriend,

how they had been reunited the night before.

Yesterday night, we got back together, and I fucked the shit out of her,

I missed her so much.

He said it like their love

saturated every atom of his being

and shook him,

as if all his veins were laid bare

to weep at the memory of her,

as if his ache for her was a chasm

he could never hope to cross,

only tumble into headlong.

Timid virgin that I was,

my eyes wide open as if he had just tried to convince me

of a God I didn’t think could exist,

I nodded sympathetically.

Sobbing, he wiped his eyes

stormed away from me

into the slush,

ashamed

of laying his emotions so bare,

and never talked to me about her again.

Now, over twenty years later

I make my living with words.

But all I can say about the bombs that sought my family

is: they missed us.

I still can’t reach out to my friends,

especially my fellow straight boys,

their eyes the size of stop signs.

I find myself wanting to tell my mother and father I love them and

I just

can’t.

I think about that boy,

in that cold cart corral,

how he found

the only words he could—

perhaps more importantly—

the vocabulary to overcome himself.

And I wonder

if I ever will find a language

to speak of the things

that haunt me the most.

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