What Conviction Means

It was a feeling I will never forget—the last time you laid your fists on me. Because it was exactly empty. I learned to like emptiness more than pride. 

Emptiness follows, it lingers. It is a sentence that leaves no further questions. A desert that croaks its last prayer for quench, frozen in the toasted sienna of the sun, a light source egalitarian to all, merciful to none. A death sentence. Bare. Free.

If I wanted a full feeling from you and got one, one of lusciousness like the evergreen redwoods winding down the curves from the 49 to 20, on the rise to Reno, it would have left me already. 

What fills itself must be emptied. What’s ripe and fertile will inevitably be scorched into desolate plains, like your arm hairs and tender cheeks scathed by the napalm skies and air raids in Vietnam—peeled and eaten away.

A sentence that grows longer, starves further. It has conviction. It makes itself more to want more. It is a stomach lining that gets scalpeled wider.

A full feeling decays. An empty feeling may one day convince itself that it was all there ever was. And that is good. And that is smart.

It doesn’t remember the scorch or the massacre. It relishes the silence. 

This is nothing. This is all an empty feeling remembers itself to be. Emptiness stays—It stays, because nothing stays.

And this is all. All I want from you.

The Flood

When death comes, I want to look back and say

I’ve touched the dirt on the ground.

That I snubbed my heels into the soil.

and felt my skin on grass,

the emerald blades breathing minerals

cloaking the Earth.

I want to have been where its down and deep

where my bones will go,

for my footsteps will go further.

I want to be able to tell people, 

I was once a girl, hollering and belting Whitney and Lauryn 

from the back of a roofless lowrider, or in some vintage car, beat car, 

that sputters and croaks like old love in the snaking cities,

wind caressing the strands fleeing my ponytail

and whipping themselves in surrender 

to my sticky, mauve lipstick that I never outgrew.

I want to be the one that shoveled the grime, 

the scent of sweat mixing with shampoo

and sage,

working with my hands in a way that is art that is soul.

I would have built a place,

a library or community center or something of the sort

and then be in it.

Sat on a sofa that sagged in a benevolent wink.

An old woman, wrinkles like a face that is the converging of maps.

Wool coat and gold buttons

I want to say that I have forged castles, 

dilapidated walls of oppression with liberating laughter

reverberating in classrooms and in youth.

I want to see my people heal

in some version of a world 

or exactly a world, 

where people overpower profit-tinted eyes,

glaring back with precision—

Where I come home, with communities

of immigrants and children brave

with education, as resilience floods the streets

as it drowns incarceration with care

as it drowns it in potlucks and ball games

as it drowns violence in voice.

I want to permeate my words with permanence

to have been in articles and archive halls

and see my name, two words once afraid, 

sassy in the rolling credits of documentaries,

not from bloated bravados or fortunes of filth or 

fashionable, sexy scandals of half-truths 

but because I hacked off chains,

watched them fall off in little couplets and jabs of questioning.

I want to ask—

Did I stomp arguments in court rooms, 

challenge persecution with lapel pins glinting from my collar, starched,

and with my motherland’s honor?

And have I stared down world leaders like a crouching beast

behind my notebook that shook the man behind the podium,

so behind the gun?

Will I have an office that is more like piles upon piles of books?

Would I be able to prove

I did a good job at trying?

For when I clock out, I want to say that

I shouldered my purse and kicked off my heels for sneakers on the A,

and met my people in the night, 

down and dirty in the speakeasies

for slam, for poetry in protest

and jazz renditions reclaimed,

hymns snatched back from greed and conquest. 

As I danced in the music swelling,

danced between the verbiage,

I would have felt the patio buzzing with

gumbo and kebab and laab in smiling mouths, 

and above everyone the urban fireflies called windows

and street lamps decorated our time.

I want to be able to say, I saw everyone dancing,

blazing horizons with harvest flames that filled plates with parties and power.

I want my arms wrapped with ink, 

lilies blooming as tattoos, 

yellow and black tigers ready to leap from my shoulders,

my jade and gold bangles clanking and cluttering and chiming 

as you hear me

enter rooms and storm off in haughty mannerisms.

The people dancing would have gathered again.

I want to say I gathered with them

among signs, marches, and drums.

I would have seeds.

I want to say I have planted them beyond myself,

as I hummed in Little Saigon and Oakland and New York, Queens

and watched the golden leaves glide from Sacramento trees.

I want to say that I swiped my jewel-toned scarf over my neck

from a little ferry in the Ocean from the Bay to the great Washington lake,

that I stood on that ferry as I peered 

at the old Seattle trees revealing themselves in the fog,

and can say I’ve been that granular spirit looking up from its

titan roots, into the canopies of green in heavenly awe.

I want to say that I have been the mother of worlds. 

Shelved Intimacy

All along each deck of my skeleton,

each ridge of my spine,

an author left its prose, 

be it parceled, be it whole,

be it first drafts and severed form.

The bookshelf that is my personhood, 

ribcage belonging to centuries like the old oak.

My bones adorned with stories, shelved with saga,

and my marrow painted with metaphor 

for grief and heroes’ journeys 

incomplete.

The sturdy frame, belonging to me and carved by names 

I’ve known, I’ve loved, I’ve memorized,

that urges me to stand.

I leave my carcass out whole. The world stares

at the titles written on all of these book spines, 

each housing printed word, all too real and scathing

as if these memories are my organs I left hanging out in the open,

that these books are the tissue that fills 

my skeleton of a wooden case brimmed with language,

almost delightfully, almost poetically

in this body, open selection of knowledge, of storied mistakes, for the gods.

In this bookshelf that is my cartilage, my filament, my collagen, my keratin,

identity lays itself bare in old pages, mucked with dust and crinkled corners,

foldable maps and line cook paychecks tucked into the book jacket

that smell of old vinegar and redwood and Tiger Balm and white hairs.

Identity kisses shyly in new pages, too, smooth to the touch and mind,

before meeting new fingertips like in a curtsey of a shy girl.

Part of me are the books I wish to read, but never do,

because starting them commits me to too much,

too real, too close to being seen.

There are those books with the pretty covers,

ones I say that I’ve read, but haven’t, and probably never will,

because sometimes lying about the soul’s cravings

keeps the heart beating.

The books I visit over and over again, 

with the well-admired grainy texture of the paper and

the spines bent out of place and wrinkles in the colors exposing white,

in which I find new meaning each time,

a tale that never ceases its teachings.

There are books gifted to me, and

among them are the ones I have read front to back and have loved,

among them are the ones that grew obsolete, unopened,

as people love as much as people leave.

In my ribcage that houses my heart,

there lives drama, and romance, and tragedy,

there lives comedic relief,

biography needed for autobiography.

Look into this shelf,

my skeleton slabbed with pages and souls that know words

or the feeling of them,

so I mean the whole wide world that can dance between the space made by two covers.

My soul, my being, finds itself in a display of language,

cold and dry to the touch.

The Most Beautiful Moment in the World

In the coldest corner of the mountain,

I was naked.

The skin of my feet dry.

I sat in the only washroom 

and pierced my eyes into the chapped tile as if

looking for an invisible mist to speak.

My lips broken,

licked over and over.

I made a reel of scintillating mold.

Above, behind me the transparent window pocket

of every terrain’s embedded ledge.

A diary-sized panel of glass.

It was the room that was hungry.

Bottom bare on the toilet seat,

I looked away but looked forever

under the window’s gaze.

I was what the mountain peered into except

I peered further. I peered

into the wall of opacity.

I was the first to feel cold without seeing the snow.

Goosebumps scratched in bubbles on every corner of my limbs.

I toed my feet into the porcelain ground

and stamped harder into the pavement

I chose for a carousel of fighting.

On a ground not moving I know where my feet are.

I jam into the pavement a stamp mark of my own keratin.

Toenail hoofing the suburbanite grid of a tundra. 

My standing my only welding glaze.

Under a photo panel 

of the coldest corner of the mountain

my eyes never leave my body as they wait

for my feet to puncture.

Walk like you haven’t lost yet, so don’t move.

Self-made parachute in a plummet.

I will save nothing.

When the purge comes,

there will be nothing left for me to save

so I close my eyes to thank you.

Foothill Drive

With the gas tank filled just enough to last the intrastate hopping,

our family presses forward into the night

without much thought about being missed

by what happens in the sunniness. 

Baba listens to Mama

and responds as he traces the Honda wheel with his palms

in a way one does 

when checking the pulse of a dead thing.

In the dark,

we pass through the dry foothills

with the scraggly grass veils

pruned colorless at every day’s high noon

like the white hair on a corpse’s chin

and held always

in the lateness of every consecutive nighttime

with a rather omniscient presence,

that is for doing nothing that will ever

last permanently.

It is when the desert sun sets.

Honeying a burnt tongue in a wet saliva mouth.

It is when we gloss what has been done

and think

Let it rest for a while.

Is it not deserved?

The family rides in this Odyssey

in the same meandering movement as

everything that is unsure.

There is no setting in the place we are in

and after all these years

I will ask Baba and Mama

What is a destination? and then I will wait.

The patch of a tousled hair

that is the big question between the Sierra Nevada and the Central Valley.

An unprobed scalp.

A feeling removed.

Ponderosa pines stringing 

along both sides of the highway,

laid as carefully as angel ribbon,

like the outer strands of an

uncommenced braid

or perhaps a braid picked apart so carefully

and flattened to a fragmented origin

so it is something that can be new.

Composed by first being seen as decomposed

by the people who saw the core before there was fruit.

On the foothills,

on the road in its absences,

we glance at the raised dirt slabs as I imagine 

What if there was a giant’s butcher knife that had parted this dirt 

and we are just whatever muck that crawled out of it?

I look up like there is something beyond us on a raised stage.

A slice of what holds roots.

On a drive-by where violence doesn’t count as violence,

we crouch there,

wither-intended poppies who marvel the proud footloose

and, if we crouch there for long enough,

maybe soil will begin to fill our socks with a living thing.

On this foothill drive

to Grandfather’s funeral,

my Mama tells about the family

like a narrator and just that.

Those who we somehow don’t talk to much anymore

and those who don’t shut up.

Those who saw the war and those who felt it on bluing flesh.

Those who were the negligible splinters

on the ocean raft who, in a way, 

encapsulated the happening.

My thirty-eight-year-old

fucked up Bic-Razor cousin born with the Eureka seal

who is home, now, smoking pot in PoPo’s

bathroom with the wrung adult diapers still dripping

from water in the peony-pattern tub.

He thinks of high school.

A VHS tape paused mid-cascade and pre-avalanche.

He dumps a glass of water over PoPo’s head

and watches the clear liquid break around

her like a closing bulb.

PoPo sits there blinking fast,

not muttering much.

A glass with a hand still closed over it.

One of the aunts. The knife.

The desire to scream Run! Run! Run so I don’t have to.

The family in Little Saigon and the Sacramento home.

The one who saw and the one who threw

and the knife that speared into the off-white wall

and landed in the wood

in a shape of a dead mouth sewn 

with smile lines.

The cousin dressed wrongly

in the unerodible nest with no care to give ourselves.

He lights the blunt.

The corpse in the pine tree that fell.