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Skipping Stones

A Poetry Collection | Trung Phi '25

Richmond, June 2023

tug that mask tighter, you are entering as a pheromone, mixing in ennui. the bus sighing through gentrified concrete. a theory: converging lives, however ephemeral, is efficient. prove it. so you do, watching their departure halting our boredom: a mother in a pink sari and her daughter wearing ripped jean shorts and an eagle tee. hands conjoined because a culture contradictory is a country variegated. that child, barely in elementary, but last week they shot them 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 at a high school graduation 8 feet from where you lived and wonder, since when did gunfire replace fireworks? sounds of celebration, and for whom but the supreme court shutting down affirmative action a week later because they love watching us fight just to distract from their legacies. you finalize your hypothesis. pull the cord. feel the souls of burned maples from canada wash over you in smoke. take off your mask, smolder the malaise. leave as not a citizen but a neighbor.

Skipping Stones

My god, you are so young, she said

The years between us folded in her wrinkles

Traveling down her moles like stones skipping

Across the surface, rippling towards her tongue,

The words sinking as she gazes into my eyes and

Suddenly, I am only nineteen, I am only a boy

All this working and studying to get somewhere

But she is asking me why and [laughs], this child

So eager to work, to infiltrate adulthood

As if he has seen anything but the surface ripping,

That rock thrown so forcefully, so anxious

For the depths of sea and not the vast of sky

We are so socialized to be courteous

for today I cried watching

an Asian boy gesture to

a White woman

triple in age and height

standing behind him

to fill her water bottle

and is adamant until she obliges

then on tippy toes the child

lets the stream fill not his body

but the thirst itself

Moving In

there is a gentleness lingering

between the linoleum where you

jumped too high, soju in your ears

and music on your lips then

crack, the plank exploded with

laughter echoing down the stairs we hauled

two bed frames up yesterday, thin linen hung

on a plastic rod over the window because

it hurt to wake in the morning, our eyes hit

by coffee’s aroma and our noses by the

sight of dirty bowls on the countertop,

slowly filling a house to make a home

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