For the holidays, our Lutheran sponsors used to give us a blue cookie tin. Within lay two layers of small hard cookies separated by little white paper cups with frilly edges. My five siblings and I, we’d fight over the round ones with sugar sprinkles. For Christmas my sister gave my daughter a box of shortbread cookies shaped like Scottish terriers. She wanted to share them with me, and they tasted so much like those cookies from our childhood I had to close my eyes and look away. Her five-year-old eyes track some commercial in which white men are playing at battle and she asks me about war. I want to tell her that her grandpa once told me how one of his friends on the front lines got hit in the side with a rocket while crawling out of a foxhole, and he had to pick up smoking pieces of him and put him into a cookie tin to send the remains to his family. I want to say that one of the few things my father showed me from Vietnam was a black-and-white photo of him and his brother; one day I will have to find a way to tell her how he was killed. Or my father will tell her, if he can bear to tell it in English. I want to say I am made of war and that means so are you. I want to say I was born inside a halo of gunpowder. No—a silhouette of a circle left by an exploding bomb. No—a snake eating itself. But instead I take a deep breath and begin to tell her, Your Ông ni, he fought in a war, along with many others, and like many others he didn’t want to. And that’s why I am here and you are here. And that is why sometimes other people look at us and they don’t know why we are here and sometimes that makes us feel like we don’t know, either. And like so many other times, I don’t know how to end these truest of stories. At the end I say nothing; I just look into her eyes, wishing I could say surviving all of this makes you tough.

Shell

Brown people getting bombed—

how can you

even think

about

love?

But you do.

You don’t want to be

thankful it’s not you—

you want to

wrap your arms around all of it.

You can’t.

The news crackles

drones drop

blossoms

empty

the heads of children

no science fiction

to save them.

You’d settle for a tattoo of a heart

an empty outline

an approximation

of a thing.

You can’t control the beating.

Go to Where the Love Is

Now there is a high fence

around mom’s garden and the sidewalk.

Wood and chain link.

Thunderdome of the ghetto.

A dope boy had run in,

ditched something,