Ink Knows No Borders Read online

  at the Schaefer Beer Pavilion, New York World’s Fair,

  amid the crowds glaring with canine hostility.

  But the cops brandished nightsticks

  and handcuffs to protect the beer,

  and my father disappeared.

  In 1964, I had never tasted beer,

  and no one told me about the picket signs

  torn in two by the cops of brewery.

  I knew what dead was: dead was a cat

  overrun with parasites and dumped

  in the hallway incinerator.

  I knew my father was dead.

  I went mute and filmy-eyed, the slow boy

  who did not hear the question in school.

  I sat studying his framed photograph

  like a mirror, my darker face.

  Days later, he appeared in the doorway

  grinning with his gilded tooth.

  Not dead, though I would come to learn

  that sometimes Puerto Ricans die

  in jail, with bruises no one can explain

  swelling their eyes shut.

  I would learn too that “boycott”

  is not a boy’s haircut,

  that I could sketch a picket line

  on the blank side of a leaflet.

  That day my father returned

  from the netherworld

  easily as riding the elevator to apartment 14-F,

  and the brewery cops could only watch

  in drunken disappointment.

  I searched my father’s hands

  for a sign of the miracle.

  Martín Espada

  History Lesson

  My grandfather left school at fourteen

  to work odd jobs until he was old enough

  to join his Lithuanian kin chipping

  anthracite out of the Pennsylvania hills.

  Nine hours a day with five hundred feet

  of rock over his head, then an hour’s

  ride home on the company bus

  to a dinner of boiled cabbage and chicken.

  When the second big war broke

  he headed “sout,” as he pronounced it,

  for better work in the blast furnaces

  churning out steel along the shores

  of the Chesapeake. Thirty-two years

  and half an index finger later he retired

  to a brick rancher he built with his own hands

  just outside the Baltimore city line.

  The spring he got cancer and I got a BA

  from a private college we stood under

  a tree in his backyard while he copped

  a smoke out of my grandmother’s sight.

  “Tell me, Pop,” I said, wanting to strike up

  a conversation, “how did you like

  working in the mills all those years?”

  He studied my neatly pressed white shirt,

  took a long drag on his cigarette and spit a fleck

  of tobacco near my shoes. “Like,” he said,

  “didn’t have a thing to do with it.”

  Jeff Coomer

  My Father Takes to the Road

  My father, who never owned a new car,

  brings a used one home every Friday

  from Tom Lawson’s Used Buick.

  He takes me along for a test drive,

  and I admire the almost new

  tuck-and-roll and cherry paint job.

  “Are you gonna buy it?” I ask,

  forgetting last week’s disappointment,

  the station wagon with the fold-down seat,

  which fit my seven-year-old body.

  “We’ll see,” he coos, teasingly.

  Still dressed in his work clothes,

  he drives ever so slowly

  down the dirt road that divides

  the strawberry fields, trying not

  to stir up the dust.

  I laugh when he steers with no hands.

  He points the car west

  toward the ocean, the same one

  he crossed on a steamer at thirteen,

  leaving behind an island boyhood

  of bare feet, a bamboo hut with floorboards

  you could see through.

  He doesn’t have to say anything. I already know.

  I know my father, who, after a hard day’s work,

  relishes this drive which must come to an end:

  before the hired braceros

  return to the bunkhouse

  and break into song;

  before the hot smell of flour tortillas

  permeates the air; before my seven

  brothers and sisters are bathed;

  before Mr Kralj, the Slavonian landlord,

  arrives in his Ford pick-up

  to pick up his share,

  his half of the week’s profit.

  My father, who pushes back the car seat

  and unlaces his boots, who will not buy

  this car today or any other, is trying

  to bear down on the wheel,

  is steering with his wide brown feet.

  Jeff Tagami

  My Grandmother Washes Her Feet

  in the Sink of the Bathroom at Sears

  My grandmother puts her feet in the sink

  of the bathroom at Sears

  to wash them in the ritual washing for prayer,

  wudu,

  because she has to pray in the store or miss

  the mandatory prayer time for Muslims

  She does it with great poise, balancing

  herself with one plump matronly arm

  against the automated hot-air hand dryer,

  after having removed her support knee-highs

  and laid them aside, folded in thirds,

  and given me her purse and her packages to hold

  so she can accomplish this august ritual

  and get back to the ritual of shopping for housewares

  Respectable Sears matrons shake their heads and frown

  as they notice what my grandmother is doing,

  an affront to American porcelain,

  a contamination of American Standards

  by something foreign and unhygienic

  requiring civic action and possible use of disinfectant spray

  They fluster about and flutter their hands and I can see

  a clash of civilizations brewing in the Sears bathroom

  My grandmother, though she speaks no English,

  catches their meaning and her look in the mirror says,

  I have washed my feet over Iznik tile in Istanbul

  with water from the world’s ancient irrigation systems

  I have washed my feet in the bathhouses of Damascus

  over painted bowls imported from China

  among the best families of Aleppo

  And if you Americans knew anything

  about civilization and cleanliness,

  you’d make wider washbasins, anyway

  My grandmother knows one culture—the right one,

  as do these matrons of the Middle West. For them,

  my grandmother might as well have been squatting

  in the mud over a rusty tin in vaguely tropical squalor,

  Mexican or Middle Eastern, it doesn’t matter which,

  when she lifts her well-groomed foot and puts it over the edge.

  “You can’t do that,” one of the women protests,

  turning to me, “Tell her she can’t do that.”

  “We wash our feet five times a day,”

  my grandmother declares hotly in Arabic.

  “My feet are cleaner than their sink.

  Worried about their sink, are they? I

  should worry about my feet!”

  My grandmother nudges me, “Go on, tell them.”

  Standing between the door and the mirror, I can see

  at multiple angles, my grandmother and the other shoppers,

  all of them decent and goodhearted women, diligent

  i
n cleanliness, grooming, and decorum

  Even now my grandmother, not to be rushed,

  is delicately drying her pumps with tissues from her purse

  For my grandmother always wears well-turned pumps

  that match her purse, I think in case someone

  from one of the best families of Aleppo

  should run into her—here, in front of the Kenmore display

  I smile at the midwestern women

  as if my grandmother has just said something lovely about

  them

  and shrug at my grandmother as if they

  had just apologized through me

  No one is fooled, but I

  hold the door open for everyone

  and we all emerge on the sales floor

  and lose ourselves in the great common ground

  of housewares on markdown.

  Mohja Kahf

  Frank’s Nursery and Crafts

  The lines are long and my mom insists

  that the final amount is wrong.

  The cashier looks at the receipt and insists that it’s right.

  My mom purses her lips, looks worried,

  says, it’s not right.

  The line of white people behind us groans.

  My mom won’t look back at them.

  We both know what they’re thinking.

  Small woman with no knowledge of the way

  things are in America.

  Though year after year

  she makes flowers bloom in the hood,

  petals in the face of this land

  that doesn’t want her here.

  Finally a manager comes, checks, and tells the cashier

  she rang up twenty-two plants instead of just two,

  overcharging us by forty dollars.

  My mother holds my hand,

  leads me away

  without looking back

  at the line of white people

  who overhear

  and gasp,

  their sympathy won.

  If only I was old enough

  to tell them to keep it;

  it’s not my mom’s English

  that is broken.

  Bao Phi

  In Colorado My Father Scoured

  and Stacked Dishes

  in a Tex-Mex restaurant. His co-workers,

  unable to utter his name, renamed him Jalapeño.

  If I ask for a goldfish, he spits a glob of phlegm

  into a jar of water. The silver letters

  on his black belt spell Sangrón. Once, borracho,

  at dinner, he said: Jesus wasn’t a snowman.

  Arriba Durango. Arriba Orizaba. Packed

  into a car trunk, he was smuggled into the States.

  Frijolero. Greaser. In Tucson he branded

  cattle. He slept in a stable. The horse blankets

  oddly fragrant: wood smoke, lilac. He’s an illegal.

  I’m an Illegal-American. Once, in a grove

  of saguaro, at dusk, I slept next to him. I woke

  with his thumb in my mouth. ¿No qué no

  tronabas, pistolita? He learned English

  by listening to the radio. The first four words

  he memorized: In God We Trust. The fifth:

  Percolate. Again and again I borrow his clothes.

  He calls me Scarecrow. In Oregon he picked apples.

  Braeburn. Jonagold. Cameo. Nightly,

  to entertain his cuates, around a campfire,

  he strummed a guitarra, sang corridos. Arriba

  Durango. Arriba Orizaba. Packed into

  a car trunk, he was smuggled into the States.

  Greaser. Beaner. Once, borracho, at breakfast,

  he said: The heart can only be broken

  once, like a window. ¡No mames! His favorite

  belt buckle: an águila perched on a nopal.

  If he laughs out loud, his hands tremble.

  Bugs Bunny wants to deport him. César Chávez

  wants to deport him. When I walk through

  the desert, I wear his shirt. The gaze of the moon

  stitches the buttons of his shirt to my skin.

  The snake hisses. The snake is torn.

  Eduardo C. Corral

  Learning to Pray

  My father moved patiently

  cupping his hands beneath his chin,

  kneeling on a janamaz

  then pressing his forehead to a circle

  of Karbala clay. Occasionally

  he’d glance over at my clumsy mirroring,

  my too-big Packers T-shirt

  and pebble-red shorts,

  and smile a little, despite himself.

  Bending there with his whole form

  marbled in light, he looked like

  a photograph of a famous ghost.

  I ached to be so beautiful.

  I hardly knew anything yet—

  not the boiling point of water

  or the capital of Iran,

  not the five pillars of Islam

  or the Verse of the Sword—

  I knew only that I wanted

  to be like him,

  that twilit stripe of father

  mesmerizing as the bluewhite Iznik tile

  hanging in our kitchen, worshipped

  as the long faultless tongue of God.

  Kaveh Akbar

  Naturalization

  His tongue shorn, father confuses

  snacks for snakes, kitchen for chicken.

  It is 1992. Weekends, we paw at cheap

  silverware at yard sales. I am told by mother

  to keep our telephone number close,

  my beaded coin purse closer. I do this.

  The years are slow to pass, heavy footed.

  Because the visits are frequent, we memorize

  shame’s numbing stench. I nurse nosebleeds,

  run up and down stairways, chew the wind.

  Such were the times. All of us nearsighted.

  Grandmother prays for fortune

  to keep us around and on a short leash.

  The new country is ill fitting, lined

  with cheap polyester, soiled at the sleeves.

  Jenny Xie

  East Mountain View

  Found in a dumpster: folding table, can of Pringles.Half full,

  half empty: it doesn’t matter. Perspective’s no good

  to the stomach, which, unlike the mind, is indentured by habit,

  by imperative. Blame evolution. Blame the gods

  from which we absorb our preference for dominion, mimicking

  what we misinterpret as power unaccompanied

  by consequence. This is how we become new Americans:

  five-finger discount, Midas touch. Transfiguration

  as anti-assimilation, my mother fashions dining set and dinner

  with the loot she lugs into our apartment while I,

  months old, not even potty-trained, dream of cities shorn

  and shores away, where a daughter barters her mother’s

  last gold bangle for guaranteed passage out of the Mekong Delta,

  where a daughter barters the last thing she owns:

  her body, her crow-black hair parted down the middle,

  the length of nights lost in the South China Sea,

  nights she relives whenever their faceless forms, like sudden

  lightning, surprise her in the flesh of ordinary things—

  the coyotes, the pirates, the virgins vaulting into bottomless dark,

  nourishing sharks and not their captors. I suppose

  that’s survival: to appropriate what annihilates us, to make use

  of what appears useless. I know this despite what it took

  to know it. I know this despite the conceit of knowing. It sucks

  belonging to anywhere, to anything. Even in Heaven

  we’re trespassers, told we don’t speak English well enough.

  Even in Heaven we apply for citizenship and wait.
<
br />   Heaven’s a lot of waiting. So we master the grief of geography,

  severed from a life that persists as shadows of shadows.

  Paul Tran

  Acolyte

  The white cross pales

  further still,

  nailed arms

  watchful as window-light

  furls over the backs

  of our knees,

  as lavender shadows

  cut off our little

  necks. I am an infidel

  in this classroom

  church. I kneel with

  the other, restless

  on the cracked leather

  kneeler. I crave these

  pillars of candle.

  My mouth is avid; it

  sings fidelis, fidelis.

  My maa is in her

  kitchen crooning

  black-and-white film

  songs that curl her

  hennaed fingers

  around the rolling pin’s

  heavy back and forth.

  My baba leans forward

  in his chair, the Qur’an

  open to the last

  page, the dark words

  blurring as his eyes close

  to reconcile again the shapla-

  shaped epitaph

  on his father’s tombstone.

  With my head bowed,

  I whisper, “Amar naam

  Tarfia,” until it is

  a prayer that grows.

  I help stack the hymnals

  higher; I cup the candle

  away. I cry out, “Bismillah!”

  before I disrobe.

  Tarfia Faizullah

  Tater Tot Hot-Dish

  The year my family discovered finger food

  recipes, they replaced the roast duck with a turkey,

  the rice became a platter of cheese and crackers,

  none of us complained. We all hated the way the fish

  sauce made our breath smell. When the women

  started lightening their hair, we blamed it on the sun.

  When Emily showed up with blonde highlights

  and an ivory boyfriend, we all started talking

  about mixed babies. Overjoyed with the possibility

  of blue eyes in the family photo. That year

  I started misspelling my last name, started reshaping

  myself to have a more phonetic face. Vietnam

  became a place our family pitied, a thirsty rat

  with hair too dark and a scowl too thick.

  We stopped going to temple and found ourselves

  a church. That year my mother closed her eyes