Healing
Soundscapes
Poetry
For Us
From the mud of the Mekong to the bones of the Mississippi
From the dusty winds of Manzanar to the glowing scars of Hiroshima
From the sun in Bombay to the moon in Alaska
From the mists of the Himalayas to the ash of Volcano
From the hills of Laos to the openmouthed mic in St. Paul
From the streets of Seoul to the sidewalks of Tehrangeles
From California shores to New York corner stores
This is for us, my people, who carry the song of burning sugarcane in our lungs
Exhaling spirits with smoky spines
My people, who dig beneath sea foam with salted eyes
To exhume schools of ghosts
Lost from the boats.
This is for you, Celestial, Oriental, Asian, Asian Pacific American, Woman, Man, Queer, broke, collegiate, young old gook, spitting chink, Dog-eating dothead, faggot bitch slope,
Our beautiful black hair sticky from colliding with
Sugarcoated glass ceilings,
The ones voted most likely to assimilate
Asians: the other white meat
Bleached by color-blind lies
Buying DKNY and Calvin Klein
So our own bodies are gentrified
Bedecked in sweatshop swooshes
Resurfacing from under a pile
Of the white man’s dirty laundry
To model our minority
Cutting our eyelids to be blind to beauty
Atkins-ing our way to a rice-free waistline
Shoving fingers down the throats of ancestors
To see what comes up.
This is for you, taught to believe in magic
Just not our own
Mistaking appeasement for peace
And selling out for maturity
While they box our geography
And sell it in bougie boutiques
Our culture quite profitable
But can somebody tell me
How our culture can be hip
And yet our people remain invisible?
Divisible individuals
This ghosthood of honorary whiteness
Miss Saigon-ing our way
Into the pale arms of con men
This is for you, twisting our names
Into bleached demons so foreign tongues
Could invoke them
Mastering our own blondspeak scrabbletalk
This scored mishmash of grab-bag didactics
Cringing at the sound of our mother tongue’s syllables
This is for you, who use our split lungs as divining rods
To find the flow of our lost languages.
This is for you, whose homes are turned upside down
While men and women debate the sorrows of war
Safe from the scars of barbed wire
For you, whos lands are painted in smoke and bone
Neon bullets ripping thru green
Your heart the same shape
As the hole you buried your family in.
This is for you, whose sons and daughters picked up a gun
And wore a flag for the price of college tuition,
As your war stories fell under the noise of the machines
You operate to keep food on the table.
This is for you, shapeshifting evil, taking whatever form
They need for you to be the next enemy
Only loved when you can be used,
Asian people,
Only loved when you can be used.
This is for you, foot-stamp-handed, banks bent over microchips
On conveyer belts, bodies bent from sleeping on buses
Hands like crumpled parchment
From washing dishes
Microphones ablaze with poetry
And song
Drunk off of friendship, struggling tongues
Faking our way through karaoke.
This is for you, the sugar of your love,
The kinship of cupped hands
The riddles in our hair
Which we pull out to make sure it’s still black
Because we can’t trust our mirrors anymore
This is for you, for all of you, who still don’t know
How beautiful you are
This is for you, for all of you, who still don’t know
How beautiful you are
This is for those of us who run our fingers down
Each other’s faces
And swear
That no one
Is ever gonna steal our beauty away from us again.
This is for you
Who wiped the milk of honorary whiteness from your lips
And asked
Got Self?
My people, we are a song that we can never stop singing against the silence
My people, we are a song that we can never stop singing against the silence
This is for you, this is for ma and bo,
For the family you got kicked out of,
For the street you cipher on
From the green terraces that stack up in your dreams.
This is for the first time you curled your hand
Into a fist and understood who your enemy was
This is for the first time you picketed
The first time you sent money back to a cousin
In the motherland
This is for the first time you amplified
Your story.
We are not dandelions, weeds they uproot
To cleanse their fantasy gardens
And get their hands dirty in our soil
We are sunflowers, a blazing field
Of yellow-petal skins and brown eyes
Standing together.
This is for you,
For your yellow-brown skin
This is for you
For your black hair
This is for that beautiful mirror
I see in your eyes
This is for you
This is for you
My people
This
Is for
Us.