Affirmation
Every poem I write opens with a parent. How else
do I bless the ones that birthed me? I didn’t ask
to be alive but then they showed me how
beautiful the world could be:
chickens in the backyard, meteor showers
from a Mount Rainier parking lot, ស៊ិន ស៊ីសាមុត
songs, pickles and grilled fish.
I don’t know how to tell them
I love you. Do they know this?
One day I will publish a book so the only surviving photo
of my mother and her mother will always live
somewhere on this tender earth. Wherever I go,
I will plant the fruit trees
that grew by my father’s hand.
Learning How To Fish Again
In my dreams, my father teaches me how to fish again.
Beneath the August sun, I watch my hands morph into his:
the alligator skin, the space between our knuckles
lined and dry like mud cracks.
I only remember the difference when he grabs
my hand to hold the fishing pole and I feel the years
of genocide and civil war,
the untouched field of landmines
stretching endlessly between us. In California,
I reimagine his life:
I hold a book of poetry. I look at my hands and see
only my father’s. I imagine my father holding
the poems. In this body, my father
does not witness the bombings or the bodies
— he only reads stories about them instead.
During lecture, I google the age
of my professor who cries every time he speaks
of tenderness in the Victorian literature he loves.
1967 — two years younger
than my father — and my hands
become my hands again, the guilt
of freedom heavy
in my palms. He never told me
the dreams he had for his own life.
All I can picture is the rural night
sky, milky and struck with stars. A river pregnant
with fish, ready for catching. My father beside me,
his right hand in a fist,
jerking up to signal stop
reeling and pull. When I dream of fish, I remember
again that I am my father’s
daughter. I do not have to reimagine his life.
In this one, we catch the fish together.
