THINGS STUCK IN OTHER THINGS WHERE THEY DON’T BELONG
My mother one afternoon in a cowboy hat, sitting on a Texan bench of hay.
Me in the same configuration of time, space, & cowboy hat.
The memory in my brain like a boulder in a haystack, like a bad joke.
The sun in our faces.
The year we spent in Fort Worth, Texas, our first year in Mĕiguó.
The fluent Not-English I spoke in kindergarten.
The blond boy from Germany in the same sandbox with me, laughing at my jokes.
His name, Eammon, like Amen, unlike any Chinese or American name
I’d ever heard, a ticklish raindrop
in my ears.
The soy sauce + Tabasco sauce + mud in my “soups.”
The same ingredients + sugar in my “pies.”
Me in the biggest kitchen I’d ever seen, running around the “island,”
chased by an elderly white man my father said to call my “Texas grandpa.”
My father with his full head of black hair & British-inflected English
in the graduate religion program at Texas Christian University.
The grease-tang of kung pao chicken in my mother’s shirts,
in my mother’s far-away look, after shifts.
The Bengal tigers in the tightly fenced “forest habitat” in the zoo Eammon & I
visited.
The sand in our shoes, the sun in our faces
as we sweated over castle fortification, all afternoon.
The Goodbye I placed in Eammon’s ear.
The motels & motels I played Power Rangers in, leaving Texas
because my father had won a scholarship.
The way I came to learn the French word for “scar”
by seeing it over & over in a French Harry Potter, in my American head,
in the small bald spot on the left side of my head,
which I received one afternoon in Texas,
when I was the skinniest, sincerest Superman, & flew into the kitchen
where my mother was removing from the stove
a saucepan of milk, still boiling,
& we bumped into each other—“cicatrice.”
The cicatrice of Eammon’s Christmas card, once kept bedside,
now in a box, a basement.
My dream in the motels that my father’s scholarship
was a type of ship & soon we’d get to ride it
& reach Massachusetts, a vast
snowy island.