Ed Bok Lee

You write not what you want, but what flaws flower from rust You want to write about the universe, how the stars are really tiny palpitating ancestor hearts watching over us and instead what you get on the page is that car crash on Fourth and Broadway— the wails of the girlfriend or widow, her long lamentation so sensuous in terrible harmony with sirens in the distance Poetry is a sickness You want to write about Adoration, the glistening sweat on your honey's chest in which you've tasted the sun's caress, and instead what you get is a poem about the first of four times your mother and father split up Want to write about the perfection of God and end up with just another story of a uniquely lonely childhood If I had a dime for every happy poem I wrote I'd be dead Want to write about the war, oppression, injustice, and look here, see, what got left behind when all the sand and dust cleared is the puke-green carpet in the Harbor Lights Salvation Army treatment center A skinny Native girl no older than seventeen braids the reddish hair of her little four- or five-year-old Down's Syndrome daughter Outside, no blinking stars No holy kiss's approach Only a vague antiseptic odor and Christian crest on the wall staring back at you I didn't say all this to that dude who sent me his poems from prison You want everyone to feel empowered Want them to believe there is beauty locked in amber inside each of us, and you chip away at that shit one word at a time You stampede with verbs, nouns, and scalpel adjectives Middle-finger your literalist boss Blow grocery cash on library fines Sprain your left knee loading pallets all day for Labor Ready You live in an attic for nine years You go bankrupt You smoke too much Drink too much Alienate family and friends Say yes, poetry is a sickness, but fuck it Do it long enough, and I promise like an anti-superhero your secret power will become loss Loss like only old people must know when the last red maple on the block goes and the drizzle turns to snow Maybe the best poem is always the one you shouldn't have written The ghazal that bled your index finger Or caused your sister to reject your calls for a year The sonnet that made the woman you loved fear That slam poem you're still paying for The triolet that smiled to violate you through both ears But Poet, Sucker, Fool It's your job to find meaning in all this because you are delusional enough to believe that, yes, poetry is a sickness, but somehow if you can just scrape together enough beauty and truth to recall, yes, that Broadway car crash was fucked up, but the way the rain fell to wash away the blood not ten minutes after the ambulance left was gorgeous Or how maybe your mother and father would sometimes scream, but also wrapped never-before-seen tropical fruit for one another every Xmas Eve How in the morning before opting out I watched that tiny Native girl fumbling to braid her own and her now- snoring mother's long black hair together in a single cornrow— If I can just always squiggle down like this: even half as much as what I'd otherwise need to forget maybe these scales really will one day tip to find each flaw that made us Exquisite

All summer, the city engine's low roar capsizes our bodies into sleep, groans, evacuation— Lost to a watery anamnesis so warm it requires a raft thatched from death's flotsam to necklace its shore I swim on, calling your name In my dreams, something is always deserting But tonight, no fast shadows of birds No oceanic flowers disrobing butterflies or bright beach of child's porridge and bones— Instead, someone weaving a net from fallen hair in and around our bed to catch the breath, blood, and ritual motions that oiled us as one candle in a cave In your dreams, someone is always resisting being saved My teethare on fire, you say I said Don't fly for the labyrinth, once I thought you were admonishing me to go away I don't remember most others, a thousand seasons phonographed in through a wounded window Everyone can't have a cactus Just o.k. empty all the rice from my legs

Hmong Hunter Charged with 6 Murders Is Said to Be a Shaman — new york times If a tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound? If a rifle fires a shot in the woods, whose body first hits the ground? If a group of angry hunters surrounds, curses at, and accosts you for wandering onto their land If you apologize for being lost, inform you saw no posted signs, swallow their chinks this and gooks taking over that; are walking away over mud and fallen leaves when a loud crack far behind you kicks up black earth If your father was conscripted to fight on the side of the United States for the cia during the war in Vietnam If he, your mother, you—the oldest son— and all your younger siblings were later abandoned in the hills of Laos as targets for genocide by the Viet Cong If after five years in a Thai refugee camp, you come to this land as a teen, a casualty of history and time, then receive three years of training to become a sharpshooter in the u.s. military If you spent your adolescence watching blacks, Asians, Latinos, and whites watching one another watch each other for weakness and flaws If, after this first blast, you wheel around in a bright orange vest; glimpse in that split second an angry, possibly inebriated man lowering or resighting his rifle If, in that icy moment, you recall the Native friend you used to collect cans with; once watched his three-hundred-pound father unload himself from a Chevy Impala and chase the boy down University with a ball-peen hammer If, of your own children, your quietest son lately lacks the wherewithal at school to defend himself; and your oldest daughter has always been for some inexplicable reason ashamed of you If hunting for you is not just a sport; never a time to drink beers with friends in a cabin, but rather is a factor in considering your family's winter protein consumption If you believe in God, but not the good in everyone If you hate to think about this shit, because why the fuck is it always on you to preprove your loyalty and innocence? If—frightened for your life and the livelihood of your immediate and extended family—in that split second, you reel and train your own gun back at the far face of that vapory barrel now aiming at your own If, yes, you are sometimes angry and so look forward to escaping your truck driver's life on certain designated dates, on certain designated lands, not always clearly demarcated, but always clearly stolen from the ancestors of fat drunk red men so confused they chase their own firey songs in the form of their sons Stolen from generations of skewed black backs, hunched your whole life on street corners laughing and picking their bones Stolen from the paychecks of your brown coworker social security ghosts Stolen like your own people from mountains in one land only to be resettled and resented here in projects and tenements If you barely finished high school, but you know from all you've ever seen of this system Might Makes Right, and excuses, treaties, and cover-ups appear the only true code inscribed on most white men's souls If, after such slurs, pushes, and threats in these woods it is now also on you to assess if that far rifle still locked on your face just issued a mistake, a warning shot, or murderous attempt— and the answer is: your military muscle fibers act If you then spot three four five six seven? other hunters now scattering for their atv s and, of course—if a gook, don't be a dumb one— scattering now also for their weapons If you are alone in this land, on foot, in miles of coming snow, wind, and branches and don't even know in which direction you'd run If from birth you've seen what men with guns, knives, and bombs are capable of doing for reasons you never wanted to understand If in this very same county's court of all-white witnesses, counsel, judge, and jurors it will forever be your word against theirs because there was no forensic testimony over who shot first If, yes, sometimes you can hear voices, not because you're insane, but in your culture you are a shaman, a spiritual healer, though in this very different land of goods and fears, your only true worth seems to be as a delivery man and soldier If, upon that first fateful exchange in these woods, your instinct, pushing pin to balloon, were to tell you it's now either you and your fatherless family of fourteen, or all of them Would you set your rifle down; hope the right, the decent, the fair thing on this buried American soil will happen? Or would you stay low, one knee cold, and do precisely as your whole life and history have trained? And if you did, would anyone even care what really happened that afternoon eight bodies plummeted to earth like deer?