The opposite of history is erasure.

All of you are fresh off the boat and should be grateful we even let you in

Asian Americans are the opposite of history.

Go back to where you came from

Erasure is the opposite of survival.

A boy on the school bus says I have a flat face like someone smashed it

with a frying pan.

All the kids laughed at his poetry except him.

He stared at me, a monster from his comic book,

could not look away.

I was not a boy but a movie about demons,

his eyes bright bulbs of a projector,

my face a flat screen.

No one will see past the flatness of our faces.

They mistake those full horizons for blankness,

will mock our mouths without understanding our tongues,

chant

chink

gook

chink

gook

at my

family until my family retreats.

No one cares where.

My daughter is not yet five when she learns to be scared of racists,

yet smiles at every playground

even the one where a herd of kids

chanted

chink

chink

chink

in unison at her daddy when he was a little boy

a chorus to the only song one of us could ever belong to.

What promise is there except those chants,

words that grind cinders into skin never thick enough,

until she won’t want to be herself at all—

will she be hated as

a gook first or

a woman first

or a dyke or

will there be new words

for her balled all into one,

hands digging into creased school bus seats to brace against

words that have nothing to do with her and are meant

only

for

her

What promise is there but flocks of bullies

flitting as they follow her home

fists dropping,

the opposite of feathers

Will anyone ever ask if the shadows in the corners

have ever been lit to wing

so that in dreams she can lift to love

without wondering if she deserves it

Can she crack a window and breathe a world

breathing her back—

a lung we are

but we keep tarring

smoking

these bellows

the life we deserve

but that our kids don’t.

How much energy will I spend trying to defend her against men not at all

like me

and exactly like me

You can’t protect her

she’s not a map

she’s a globe

she is not the playground

she is the falling and the getting up

teeter-totter of a daughter

she wears the easiest part of you to see

she wears the worst part of you

she wears your face

Want to Want

I want to want to wake up in the morning.

Instead I bookmark an ad for an alarm clock

with an arm attached to it—

slaps you in the face to wake you.

Before the sun rose and before he took the long bus to work

my dad shook my shoulder; we’d amble to fish

from some mucky pond by the side of a crumbling highway,