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a blind model: a collection of spoken word poems
in america, our tongues are burning
when i was ten,
i cut off my mother tongue
and tossed her body into the sea of my own ignorance,
the muddled syntax of my native language
drowning beneath waves and waves of colonial grip.
i tried to baptize my tongue--
christen it American, bleach my accent in whiteness.
i begged for acceptance
from my peers, erased my lineage
and murdered my heritage just for a chance to be normal
because here is the truth:
in america, there is an unspoken witch hunt
in which they are the predators
and we are the sinners, the hexes, the burdens.
our tongues and forefathers and sacrifices
are burning at the stake, doused in the kerosene of whitewash.
they make ghosts out of our ancestry,
scrub our trauma into the forgotten pages of history textbooks
like our brothers and sisters working below min. wage
for a chance at the holy prophecy known as the American Dream.
the pause between this poem
is my silence when a boy tells me to go back to my f**king country,
calls me g**k and ch*nk and dog eater,
and seven-year-old me is taught to detest my own skin,
is taught that i am more construct than human,
is taught that self-hate is the most important thing i’ll ever learn in school.
here is the painful truth:
this country has never been ours to call home.
to be both american and non-white and immigrant
is to be the perpetual foreigner,
to be labeled an alien
before you’ve even stepped into the room.
dear vincent
when the wooden frame
of that baseball bat entered your skull,
when those men shouted,
it’s because of you motherf**kers that we’re out of work!
while you lay on the floor,
nebula searing across splattered brain and splintered bone,
what did you say?
did you tell them,
i’m not japanese--i’m american,
did you think about the difference between denotation and connotation,
how asian-american means to be a phantom citizen,
to be treated like an unwanted demon in this kingdom of supposed equality?
as your ribs struggled to grasp another breath of air,
did you wonder about the toxicity of your own body,
how it felt to be murdered for simply existing,
for the crime of drinking and laughing and talking at a bar
in the wrong place at the wrong time?
did you tell them,
please, my family, my fiancée--
did you think about how your wedding day would become your funeral,
how your mother’s tears would collect like dust
at the bottom of your casket?
did you think about how your father wouldn’t be able to sleep,
the moon simply a cruel reminder of your ghostly face
as he stared at your mangled body,
unable to recognize his own son?
how your fiancée’s screams would echo
against the walls of a lonely house,
aching for the wedding suit and baby photos and family dinners,
the future that would never be?
did you tell them,
why, why me--
thinking about how the judge would not rule it a racially motivated hate crime,
how your murderers would serve no jail time,
how your name--your legacy--would cease to exist
in history books, in protests, in justice?
or did you simply lay there in silence,
eyes wide open, limbs flailing for just one--one more--breath?
vincent, i’m sorry.
i’m sorry that you were in the wrong place at the wrong time,
i’m sorry that if you were alive today,
you would still always be in the wrong place at the wrong time,
that you would still have to defend your basic right
to live in your own skin,
just like the rest of us.
to glow like the sun
to the man who catcalled me
for the existential crime of trying to use a public bathroom:
i was born in monsoon season,
my body a tsunami that can drown cities in its wake,
my dna made of salt and blood. i am the aftermath
of two wars and a revolution, of my parents’
immigrant dreams, so determined they broke the ocean in half
to be here. i am the almond-slant of my eyes,
the golden halo of my skin. a creation of god.
so when you tell me i look
cute for a ch*nk boy, when you wolf-whistle at me
with teeth sharp as daggers,
think my body small
and your existence big,
i will take the napalm from my mouth
and plant landmines on your skin.
i will raise my hands, calloused and strong
from carrying the weight of a fractured bloodline,
and wipe the lecherous grin
off your privileged face.
this is a revolution you cannot silence.
a war in which i emerge victorious,
in which i reap the spoils of your ignorance
and stroll off the battlefield
as you suffocate in a pool of your own blood.
like the sun, i am learning
how to be proud of my own glow.
so the next time you try to smother me
with your unwanted advances,
i will shine so brightly that your narrow-minded eyes
will be blinded by my presence
while I walk away
without so much as a glance in your direction,
my body burning brilliantly with warmth,
untouchable, invincible.
bound
in dreams, i imagine
immigrant bones stretched from atlantic to pacific,
yellow bodies buried beneath train tracks,
railroads harvested from their pain,
their screams, tears stinging cracked earth,
knuckles split open like the miles and miles of iron and steel
we built for white profit.
and thirteen years later,
the Chinese Exclusion Act
proclaims us outsiders in this land of golden opportunity
so that even our successes always end in tragedy,
and we are told our bodies are simply cogs in a machine,
numbers, slaves, ghosts.
not human here.
i think of the model minority myth,
the women and men and children working in slums
and chinatowns infested with litter and p*ss-smelling air,
their backs hunched in restaurants and laundromats and nail salons,
bodies flailing barely above the poverty line--
i think of quiet voices,
the second generation, our necks craned
over textbooks, over homework
in submissive obedience, clinging to our proximity to whiteness,
climbing on the backs of other others,
reaching desperately
for a status we cannot obtain--
i think of the past,
japanese internment and pacific railroad tracks,
our ancestors buried beneath inglorious layers of dirt and bone,
how hope for the future generation
was the only comfort they had ever known--
in dreams, i hear their voices, singing:
young one, young one, listen--
so the caged bird is clipped of its wings,
and our voices are silenced by the echoes of their shouts,
but you mustn’t wait
nor sit in complicit silence.
you mustn’t wait,
for their power will only grow stronger
if you choose to remain blind.
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