Dear Teacher,

I stumbled into your poetry workshop even though I wasn’t studying poetry. I was one of the few graduate students there. I remember you at the head of a long wooden table, presiding, as if your chair were a throne. The room was brown with wood everywhere. We were knights of poetry. Our plates were white sheets of paper filled with our own flesh. Your words were infinite. They were an entire country.

At the end of class, you wrote each student a note. Your note said my poetry had become poems out of poetry and that my poems had begun to strike forward to the possibility… You also wrote that you wished I had made my voice more present in class and that my form of articulation was far from shy. You told me to call to talk about next semester.

I’m sorry for never saying a word in your class the entire semester. I’m sorry that striking forward scared me, made me numb, stitched my mouth closed. But you gave me so many new words that I didn’t know how to use yet.

One student was burning metal even then. Sometimes I would watch her mouth move, the way the air would take the shape of her words. Watching her speak was a kind of bereavement.

Each breath was so beautiful, there couldn’t be anything but loss.

Fall Reading List For Victoria:

Louise Glück: Descending Figure The House on Marshland

Wallace Stevens: Collected Poems

Sappho: Every shred possible?

Neruda: Collected

Vallejo: Posthumous Collected (I think)

does Plath fit in your life—Collected—and Lowell—Selected

I’ve never told you this, but Plath does fit into my life. I still read Louise Glück’s poems. I have read all of Sappho. I have listened to podcasts on Neruda. I have read Wallace Stevens’ Collected, but not every poem. Only Vallejo I still haven’t read much, twenty-seven years later. I’m sorry. I will try to read more Vallejo.

In another note, you wrote: I’m waiting for you to write shorter + shorter + denser + denser + louder + louder poems. I’m in HONOR of this machine.

If you saw my poems today, I hope you could see that I heard you even though you couldn’t hear me. I have tried to write shorter + shorter + denser + denser + louder + louder poems. They have become so loud that each night I fold them into origami cigarettes and smoke them so they’ll blow away.

What I learned from you was to forget the sun, that the moon burned more, to cling to things that didn’t seem to leave a trace, such as memory or silence or cruelty or beauty. I couldn’t fully understand any of this then.

I wouldn’t take another poetry class for a decade. But because of you, poetry kept on pricking me. Your voice stayed upstairs for years. I could hear it asking me questions I wasn’t yet ready to answer. I now know there are no answers. You meant for me to listen to the questions and into the absence.

I’m sorry there was never a till then—. I’m sorry I never called you to talk about the next semester. I’m sorry I wasn’t ready for all the conversations we never had. For never thanking you, for letting decades pass without another word.

My earliest memory is the time my mother scolded me in Chinese through a rearview mirror. You have such a big mouth, she said between tears and crying. You can’t say anything. Can’t tell them anything. I was five. I didn’t know who them was. I didn’t know what anything meant. All I could see were Mother’s eyes in the rectangle. Even then, she didn’t have a mouth.

Apparently, I had told my teacher that we had the same workbook at home. The teacher called my mother in and told her that she wasn’t allowed to teach me on her own. Actually, I don’t know exactly what the teacher told my mother. I was five. All I remember is my mother’s tears and my empty stomach. The ketchup stain on the seat. The slaughterhouse in my throat.

It’s only now that I think of how new my mother was to this country. How a comment from an American teacher could possibly make her scared. How she was just trying to help me do well.

My mother never talked to me about this incident again, and it’s only after her death that I’ve started to think more about how she felt. Do you know that Salman Rushdie in Shame encapsulates this alienation so lushly: It is the fate of migrants to be stripped of history, to stand naked amidst the scorn of strangers upon whom they see rich clothing, the brocades of continuity and the eyebrows of belonging.^x

On November 14, 2014, Ealy Elementary was demolished. When it happened, I thought about my mother and the promise I had given her. The promise never died with that building. There’s still a brick inside my throat. I don’t have roots, just the brick. The brick is silence. I know that I must bury the brick in order to speak, but how do you bury something that has no body?

Dear Teacher, the brilliant student in your class never stopped writing beautiful poems. Recently I watched a video of her reading in public and talking about one of my poems. To hear my words in her mouth, words that had come out of the quiet of that room was astonishing.

If you saw me today, you would know that I heard you. That I’m still trying to find words that can strike forward to the possibility—but I try not to grab them because you taught me that words are not meant to be owned. I marvel from the side at their madness. The striking is not academic. It wears a leather jacket on some days. It changes with weather. On rainy days, it is beautiful and has two-inch talons.

I still carry the brick around with me everywhere I go, but it is now outside of my throat. Sometimes I use it as a paper weight. Other times, it’s so light that it feels like I no longer have it at all.