police with their dogs spent two days

turning it all over,

dirt to ditch

in search of proof—

these things that have nothing to do with her.

More than two decades ago she was squatting,

fixing up damage

someone had inflicted on the easiest of targets:

the gooks in the hood.

Across the alley,

a multiculti rainbow of boys

shouted insults at her,

Asian and Woman

forged in translation into slurs

cutting and rusted,

tearing and worn,

needing no translator in order to wound,

they were endlessly full of youthful breath:

a hurricane never grows tired.

It destroys until it doesn’t.

She won’t call the police:

Vietnamese people know

people in uniforms

make things worse.

I stood there and could say nothing.

Not even that I’d write a poem about it twenty years later.

The worst powerlessness

is when wicked men and boys

come for your family

and you can do nothing.

Now behind her high fence

she gives cucumbers to my daughter,

asks me to fix her Vietnamese cable channels.

I don’t know how.

She says she’ll die in Vietnam.

She has always said this.

It is quiet all around.

She opens the heavy gate,

nothing on the other side

kept out.

Stretching both ways the sidewalk is gray and smooth,

perfect even where it is cracked.

She smiles,

does not even look

beyond the fence.

I don’t ask

if she remembers.

She sends me home

with bags of food

she made herself.

Love is not neutral.

Never.

Lead

Dad squats under the sun

patching with trowel and wet cement,

gray swaths in the shapes of leaping dolphin backs

before being blurred into the chink.

This is not the first time he has had to fix

vandalism against us,

the ones in the hood who everyone can agree

are to blame for some war that left everyone here

smoking and threadbare.

I’d rather be at the Franklin Library, learning the difference

between basilisk and cockatrice,

Theseus and Perseus,

heroes with names we want to pronounce.

Dad complains about mosquitoes.

He swats.

I wish I were somewhere else.

I fancy myself Luke Skywalker of the hood,

in lieu of white skin and blue eyes,

a towel for a cape and a flashlight,

instruments that make me a good guy.

He jerks in the heat,

curses in Vietnamese,

hollers for me to look around

for a shooter

like it’s the DMZ

claims someone is shooting a BB gun at his back.

I am ashamed. Why does my dad

see the enemy hiding

everywhere.

Why does he insist the Communist bullets have found him

here,

finally,

in Phillips,

home of the AIM patrol

and a park called Cockroach

kids clowning each other

for accepting free cheese

when we know

all our families do.

I want my dad to be normal

not yell in his foreign tongue

that everyone is out to get him.

I am sure they’re just mosquitoes

but I am too scared of him

to tell him.

I am sure they are just mosquitoes