You do not like my hair
It frizzes, blossoms with the heat
It doesn’t match the hair you had when you were a girl
Still, it’s too much like yours, heavy, sagging curls
And too much like grandma’s
Bà ngoại is my maternal grandmother,
ngoại sounds like the same word for “outside,”
and the thudding grew heavy,
dread delayed, lagging in my stomach and my father’s
When my grandmother, your mother
passed away in Vietnam, oceans away – the outside
We couldn’t attend because she was there
and we were here – inside
and money was tight and I feared you’d get sick as well
And yet you didn’t care nor try to hear
Ears tuned deaf during your own cries,
my limbs stiff and ribcage thudding a mechanized sound I couldn’t recognize
Your body rippled like the waves of your hair,
or a flag in the wind,
or the stem of a white flower bending in the glare of a storm
And you fell to your knees on my messy, clothes laden floor, like how you would drop in church
Sobs and cries I’d only ever hear from my mouth came incoherently out of yours
Wailing like a daughter lost, wailing like a 5 year-old lost
Mantras under your breath turned to prayers on your tongue,
Mantras and prayers I could not make out, understand, answers that couldn’t defrost
I like to say I am fluent in Vietnamese
‘cus I can greet, and pray,
and my intonations sound correct to the untrained ear
and my voice is light, polite, airy — filial
I like to say I am fluent, and yet you spoke a language I could not comprehend then,
my second language — your mother tongue —
and what I could make out was something I could not answer,
“Do you remember her? Do you love her? Con có nhớ bà ngoại, không? Con có yêu bà ngoại, không?”
Your mother tongue became alien in my mouth then
You changed afterward, you got funnier
You spoke, rambling, of colors, clothes, home
Not this (inside) home, but your home
Not with me, or Dad, or our cat Chii
That outside home with grandma and chickens and relentless, beating, bristling sun
Your funniness, oddities, were your grief manifesting
Transforming, taking tangible shape, footsteps, in how the house became haunted
Like I had a roommate I never saw, like a zombie roamed our halls
Dad spoke to me like I was a child — “She’s sick, not crazy,”
I couldn’t argue with you, couldn’t cry when you said something you didn’t mean,
tiptoed in my own room and learned to differentiate my footsteps from yours
from when we used to patter up the stairs in tandem, and it burned me, searing me clean
We’d go to church without you, sat in a pew with a distance between us where you would’ve sat,
but the motions done mechanically, like a wooden heart with no bone or body
Sit, stand, sit, walk, communion but Dad didn’t walk with me
since he couldn’t savor communion without distress lining his palate and jaw
Do you remember? What you said to me?
I could hear it, not understand it, I could hear it all, feel it
Taste the vitriol
Plain, simple Vietnamese
Cutting, biting Vietnamese
No apology, your right as my mother gave you no culpability
And the letter you gave me in ninth grade,
your handwriting, your swirling penmanship,
your love, your voice
I threw it away like it was a liability,
the item holding me back from being angry,
and afraid, and clouding my tenacity
Do you remember?
I didn’t ask Dad if he picked it up,
his overworked, calloused hands in my trashcan would have eaten me up, swallowed me whole, left no bones of me
I knew I didn’t tear it apart,
too permanent, too much hatred I didn’t hold and couldn’t grasp
Though, I didn’t look back,
I didn’t ask
I was afraid that my pride and spitefulness would be my own reckoning, my own chain and clasp
It waned and waxed and sometimes eclipsed you wholly
But those moments of lucidity, of clear stars
When you told me you loved me before I was even born
When my heart sought familiarity and your hands traced my nails, my palm lines,
I could not help but mourn those moments
Do you remember?
My feet, rough, shoeless against asphalt lined roads
The cops, asking me if I spoke English because he didn’t understand you, and I’m your daughter?
Tethered? Sewn from that same generational quilt?
Our stupid cat fighting with a stray in the shrubs?
It embarrassed me as he lost,
and I couldn’t act like the mature, sound-minded, articulate, not crying 15 year-old I was
And that dumb cat didn’t come back until 3am,
and Dad’s voice shook as I floated to the shower,
and as I waited, and as I slept by the door until he came back
Dad always said we couldn’t get a cat
because there were already two dogs in the house — me and you
2006 and 1970, Pisces and Sagittarius,
naturally opposing ends of the zodiac wheel,
and yet we can’t unscrew, untie, unfetter us two
A few weeks ago I braided your hair like mine,
and I did it like how you taught me to with my My Little Ponies,
And you used my skincare, my straightener, too
I wish you knew I envy your freckles, your deepend crow’s feet,
our faces similar and yet yours so
dependable
I wish I could read this to you,
translate it, breathe it and sigh the language like you do,
but my intonations would be incorrect, my pauses awkward, my words choked up in my throat to come
undone and spew something I didn’t mean
And I’m scared to recite this to you,
more scared than I am of retelling it in a random room, a cold, big building all clean
Do you remember?
You called me the day before this,
and I said I loved you, and I missed you,
and you said, “Baby, my whole world is made entirely of you.”
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