In the Asian market,
there’s always ready-to-eat sweet 🥭
sitting side-by-side with lychee fruit.
Always 🐟, chips, soy sauce and spicy dried 🐙.
Always an array of mint greens and 🧅.
Always the s m e l l . . .
of dead 🐟 and live 🐟,
and buckets of 🦀 and 👴👵.
The foul smell smacks me dead in the face. "This is nothing,” they say.
What’s foul is the Agent Orange that stacked up bodies
outside childhood 🏠. This is nothing.
Death means nothing unless you make it and we don’t make it. We won’t ever make it.
Maybe this is why it’s normal to beat each other
with cutting 🔪 as 🤝,
in the long lines and bustling heads fighting over 🥕,
over the dead roast 🦆, over the smelliest 🐟,
always fighting over a carcass to honor the dead.
The war is over, yet why is there still chaos?
I wonder if my aunts and uncles really speak to each other anymore,
because the taste of death has d r i e d their 👄.
Mom snatches the 🥕 out of another woman’s hand.
She looks just like her.
Short burgundy dyed hair, could be her sister,
and she is.
Not only was there a North and South divide,
there was a splitting of families.
I guess witnessing childhood friends leaving life for death
does that to a person,
but a person turns into a people real quick.
Families become enemies.
There’s a North and South easily found in the kitchen.
Mom says– Mom says, “This is how you make it.
Add the 🥕 in first, let it boil.”
Then Aunt retaliate says, “No, no, this is how you make it.
Add the 🥕 in first.”
Then all I hear are many ways of making one 🍲.
All I hear are many ways of not trusting one who is your own.
There are stories shared without talking,
floods our mouths with the South China Sea.
They do not cook to fill our hunger, they cook to filltheirs.
Each night, each bite, reminders of the nights spent near dumpsters.
I wonder if my parents never learned to teach us, kids,
the words love or trust,
because they were taught how foreign and dangerous they were,
like how they loved and trusted the very people that look like them
just to wake up to a blood sunrise on their front porch in 1955.
They still wake up to a cataclysm of red ingrained in their memory,
still wake up to the bottoms of the brown boat as shields,
still wake up to the sounds of collapsing bodies,
and maybe… maybe there won’t ever be healing.
But here…
in the Asian market,
in the midst of chaotic shouting, the snatching of 🥬
and sweaty bodies grazing each other,
here is where we allow intimacy.
Here, there are no borders or boundaries.
Here is where we remember the dead.