Many thanks to @narioli.bsky.social and Thimble Lit Mag for publishing "When Ruth Recounted How" in Volume 7.4 -- this will be the first time I'll see one of my poems in print!
#queerpoem #aapiwriting #newpoet
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#aapiwriting
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the #poem in việt, possibly the poem before as companion to this piece, written in my clumsy việt
actually this post is inspiring me to do a reflection of fluency verbally and an 8th grade writing proficiency, and the dilution of culture in #diaspora
#writing #poetry #aapiwriting #aapivoices #aapi
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been working on this, it’s my letters to mẹ series
working title:
too american// not việt enough
cant tell if it’s a poem or an essay lol
#aapi #aapiwriting #writing #poetry #poems #aapipoem #viet #vietwriting
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starting from second paragraph: a smile i imagined as a child was a seed planted as you rode your xe đập your cycle, as you called it a vietnamese adaptation of france’s indochine slang through the streets of saigon speeding through vigilantly and with grace as bombs fell and bullets rained white soldiers remarking and retorting a smile in imagine you became comfortable with in daddy’s naval office, at 18 becoming his secretary and with it, i wont say mẹ
after your 7 years working by day, getting your degree by night proudly retiring from there not so long ago. the older i got, the more i began to master the smile too, mẹ to the asian american woman, this is our “yes sir” and our penance, safety in invisibility. does it anger you as it does me, that we took our own voices? first, before the white men could. did you ever wonder if you were worth more? that you could be more? they way that do, in my “what if’s” if hadn’t swallowed up my dreams. i commend you for handling this dissonance better than i, rather your ability to contain it i feel i breathe silent screams
when we left that office, i knew the curtain would fall along with the smile-that wasn’t for me. and what would come next “you have one job and you can’t do it you’re too american” “you’re humiliating the family” they might as well have been your catchphrases, mẹ they are badges woven into my esteem i’m sorry i didn’t come greet you when you drove those hours that brisk day, mẹ ơi i was again 15, shuffling down the cinderblock hallway what else could better humiliate, be “too american” than to be fucked in the head you did what flocks of richer than us, whiter than us, families do with their problem children adults now, sent away to learn to eat
promised myself i would take a #writing break to focus on my physical health i’d been neglecting but t’s a compulsion at this point (warning first has light mention of SH)
#aapi #vent #vietamerican #aapistories #aapiwriting #biracial
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