What Are You?

I understand you.

I get what you’re trying to say.

What you’re trying to say is you want me to get it.

I get it. You want me

to understand. You...

My father threw his language overboard,

a bag of kittens, waterlogged mewling:

small hard bodies.

My mother hung on to hers —

Wove the words like...

Each adult will be allowed 150 pounds

and each child will be allowed 75 pounds of baggage.

—B.C. Security Commission, 1942...

Price depends on how the cheongsam

was made, the fabric used.

Gasp. Lift breasts with one hand.

Stuff your body inside.

If you...

I come from the land of

Where You From?

My people dispossessed of their stories

and who have died again and again

in a minstrelsy of afterlives, wakes,

      The air smells of rhubarb, occasional

Roses, or first birth of blossoms, a fresh,

...

Very loud    a mad frenzy    The wooden

barrel she rode would have roared

(I first wrote “road”)

Left home to join the circus: 15 years old

when I try to talk to my mom about what it was like

to grow up surrounded by yt people in the prairies

in the 80s though it seemed like the 50s

she tells me in a so-...