it would never burn down.

But by now we should have known

that even dark, quiet nothings

are quickly lit to flame.

Now there are just whispers

of adults with no corners to haunt,

nothing to mark a space

God kept her eye on—

not even a cinder.

Refugees from the Prom Center, the Eighties

Who says Asians can’t dance?

Old Viet people can cha-cha and tango

like their feet and hips

asked to be colonized.

You can’t handle them, so don’t.

I’m walking with kids older and taller

blocks away, the promise of video games

in some arcade, or maybe the front of a store.

I hate Vietnamese people, one of the boys says suddenly,

scowl like a blue-marbled switchblade.

I hate my own people, he laughs,

to make sure we get it.

I’ve only got one quarter.

So I hold it in my palm

and watch the other kids play

including the hater,

who puts his quarter into a slot

does his best to control

his one man of three.

Can’t remember what game he played,

or whether I cared that he hated Vietnamese people like me,

like him.

That’s a lie.

I know I didn’t care.

I was rooting for him,

even after I saw him lose

man after

man.

The Why

At a prison reading

the majority of the audience was from my neighborhood:

the guys shouted out Phillips

as if welcoming home one they once thought alien.

A beautiful black transwoman asks for my autograph.

I want to ask her story, but she walks out smiling

with the loops of my name on a page

while I stand there silent.

They’ve come to listen to the art that kept me out of this place

but I’m still the one that gets to walk through those detectors

to whatever I call home.

Now I want my daughter

to have some record of this man—

sashimi-thin when the world doesn’t want to see me,

fatty pork when they need to hate me—

they’ll consume me and there will be only silence.

A book can be another empty space

I could have been, a ghost haunting the margin—

no words to describe himself.

To Combust

When his oldest son comes home from the corner gas station

beaten for no reason

we can venture to guess Dad sees blood and thinks

how he risked his life to get us all on that plane,

jumping in, last minute,

prayer and opportunity,

looking over his shoulder once

to see shells dropping where we once stood

before becoming an alien to his homeland forever.

On to working at a sewing machine,

a bus stop where he fought off muggers a third his age.

Tried to raise six kids, we a Swiss Army knife

left open in his pocket, all sharp-edged and crazy in different ways

drawing blood when he reached in.

His wife,

but not for much longer,

yelling at him in the driveway,

in English,

in front of the nice Lutheran sponsors.