Two Poems

I Don’t Know How To Talk About Racism, so I Call My Mother About the Indispensable Pleasure of Material Things

It is night in my house. I imagine one room
safer than the rest. Other people really do exist,
and this is not a comfort. Tonight I have
no terrible news. This week my lover
works late, so the windows overwhelm
their steel frames, opening. This week, I look
like my mother in the daytime, drawstring shorts,
red scrunchie, planting lemongrass and ginger
borders, bromeliads in the trees. I hear a lot of people
move south these days for that. Someone insists this
is the first rice field in South Carolina. Mom down
in Coral Gables instagraming her vandas because
an orchid isn’t an orchid, it’s specific. Look down
on the species. Tell which leaves signify expense,
and none will last my life. No need, but the woman tonight,
to file her SSN, she lived through her ages twice. I hear
even the SSN isn’t eternal, so tonight, the woman
is anyone I love too much to bring attention to. She says
the fear keeping me up is my dream where the lotus
paste vanishes, the animals are small but endless,
and I am looking for the one I own. I don't want to go
further. She’s just closed on her house. Neither of us know
if the things we buy will last our lives. I want to know
dreams without worry. I ask my lover
what he dreams. He dreams our windows
are in the Midwest. They are broken. In the dream,
he can’t find our insurance. Like all monthly
reoccurrences, I keep the insurance to myself.

from Tonight, A Woman

The albularya says women from Kangkong can’t stand their own rain.
She warns a grief face will take my beauty for a week.

Maybe it is right that we are a little afraid of each other.
Balikbayan lives under the moon but she doesn’t like her dinner.

In the evening, a co-worker invites himself over for authentic
soup dumplings I learned to make online.

Like every American, I dream honey-wild, manna dew
for the simmer, a fat cat coming to visit me at dinnertime.

I heard you’ve heard how I eat. You want to know how I keep clean
with my fingers against my mouth, the same hands that made your dinner.

It’s true, I have no intent to reconcile.
While I am in front of this bowl, I will eat from this bowl.

Once, I told a woman who had built me a lover how to eat.
She was eating a fish, and I said, your fish has two sides.

If you are looking for love, show me that you eat.
I need to know you won’t waste my efforts.

A lover who doesn’t eat has lost control of my hands. So has the moon.
And I’ve lost control of my money. I call that grief.

Like coaxing a bone to be generous when I’m not generous.
Tonight, I congealed fat and told you it was soup. Then told you it was fat.

The month I got a promotion, I bought four dresses online, full price.
But then I could see the discounts under the dresses.

I asked ghosts to bless me. “You make time for me,”
one says when I offer her coffee. Then she asks me to pay for the moon.