At the AAPI Support Group Zoom, Everyone Waves Goodbye with Both Hands
by Eric TranSecretly, I’ve felt that a poem and its title
should resist each other. If one is clear to parse,
the other should be like a knot in your hair.
But so what if I am clear? In that Zoom, I cried
when I saw faces that looked like mine. Faces that looked at mine.
What if my hands did more than resist? More than once
in a poem I’m sure I’ve turned a set of knuckles into lips,
but let me be clear: no one should kiss you that way.
Recently, at work, a man punched right above my mouth
and in the swirl of concussion after, I still remembered the news,
elderly Asian people assaulted on the street, a man’s face cut open
in the seafood aisle, murdered Korean women who are known
by professions and not their names. In Vietnamese, to remember is to miss
and when I say it, it sounds like the English word know.
When I open my hand maybe I am offering or asking
and maybe I just want us to know all there is
to hold. Once at the Vietnamese school I went to on Sundays,
I tried to steal from the snack bar.
I grabbed more bags of chips than I could afford, hoping
to sneak away in the chaos of all us children
grabbing at sweets. The elderly cashier
caught me and I said I’d pay and she said I know.
My war-flung mother admitted she was afraid
that one day I might feel hungry and even
though we’re not so poor anymore she sends me food
that threatens to burst my freezer. At the hospital,
they gave me ice packs to nurse my lip, my head.
A bruise opens like fingers—imagine touching
any hand so gently. In Vietnamese, to need sounds
almost like the word caution, but imagine life absent of both.
My palms as fields of flower. Could you take
a bouquet to remember me? Could you marvel
without touching? Will strangers walk by
and take a large, indulgent breath? Will we all die?
Yes and yes and yes and yes.
