First, you wait.

Wait a year, or two, or ten. Or maybe you’ll wait two decades — squeezing through the cracks in eVerify and RealID until the bureaucratic walls grow too high and you must go under. Don’t forget to carry your first deportation order and stack of expired work permits to every cold and creaky sublease of your twenties. All the important details of your life are floating in the cloud anyway, split between hundreds of power-guzzling servers between two oceans, but you hold tight to your papers and wait like a good immigrant.

Be patient. Watch five American presidents enter the White House, drunk with power and full of promises. Watch four American presidents leave the White House, hungover with scandal and war crimes. Hold off on school and career and dentist appointments and funerals and weddings. Tell everyone the same sorry stories at the events you do go to: It’s impossible to take a loan out by yourself, there’s the ten-year ban to reenter, it’s too awkward and humiliating to explain your precarious status — can’t legally work, can’t legally drive, can’t legally stay — on the third date so it’s not worth the trouble. Cobble together a living by taking up part-time gigs, responding to ads on Craigslist, and selling your data to corporations that can maximize extracting your true value. The market’s parasitic interest in your spending capacity seems flattering compared to the country’s flat rejection of you in general.

The years will trudge on and your life will slump under the weight of your waiting, but you must try to remain optimistic like a good American. To stay busy, you will cultivate delightful delusions about the person you could be after this strange period of your life is over. You could become a landscape photographer, a pilot, a person who safely indulges in parkour with the knowledge that they have health insurance. It keeps you childish, all this potential that will never turn into momentum.

No one says anything about your emotional regression and plummeting foresight until your best friend of fifteen years finally calls out your perpetual tardiness on a Thursday night. You were late to dinner, again. She waved you into her apartment saying it didn’t matter, but now that a pile of dirty dishes and a bowl of sliced honeydew and cantaloupe divides the two of you, you’re not so sure. It would be devastating to lose your extraordinary friend to failures of attention and timekeeping. Sometimes, when you realize in the middle of the night that you didn’t respond to yet another “how are you?” missive because you once again didn’t know what to say to that, you think of showing up to her door with a bottle of wine and a bag of soggy takeout to apologize and explain yourself. But you never do because her boyfriend stays over all the time and you wouldn’t want to interrupt his sleep or worse — risk him interrupting your conversation. More and more, you feel self-conscious about how your desire to be close to her has not changed but she has. It is not her fault she has other people in her life and you do not.

Your friend abruptly announces, “I think you’re depressed.”

You take a chunk of each melon and chew both at the same time, hoping the fusion of two similar but distinct flavors will bring a unique tasting experience. It doesn’t. Your friend looks expectant, but you are only thinking how funny she is when she tries to be serious. You have spent so much time waiting for this country to reform, for the rain to come, for winter to end, and for what? Things are fine as long as she’s around and it’s just the two of you goofing around.

“I don’t think so,” you tell her. Then you suggest trying both fruits at once.

As you step out of her building, you run into your friend’s boyfriend and exchange small talk on the stairs. He discloses that he’s planning on proposing to your friend soon. He inquires after her preferences and your blessings. You give them both freely — your friend deserves all forms of happiness. With stunning ease, you can envision the trajectory of your friend’s life because she is brilliant and beautiful and destined for great things; meanwhile, you can barely picture the next day of your own life. It’s as if your timeline has fallen out of sync with the rest of the world’s, as if you’ve fallen so far behind your peers and catching up will remain impossible.

After many years, it will dawn on you that you are not waiting for Congress, you are waiting for yourself to become crooked and hopeless enough to become capable of leaving. Slowly, painfully, inevitably, the circumstances of your life will catch up to you until one afternoon, you will wake up in a dim room and wonder how you lasted this long. You will peel yourself out of bed, pick a date, and buy a suit.

Second, you face Immigration.

On a Monday of your choice (wearing clothes you have also chosen), you’ll walk into the regional office of the Department of Homeland Security. Years ago, you watched a documentary on cows being readied for slaughter and you recognized their confused, fearful gaze as your own through the display monitors of countless security cameras. Now, years later, you peer into the same screen; your eyes merely look dull, like a cow’s after its brains have been scrambled with a metal prodding gun in an abattoir.

When the baby-faced officer waves you through the metal detector and asks you which office you’re heading toward, you know exactly which floor and what cubicle they’ll process you in. You’ve been here before. You’ve done this a dozen times for DACA before the previous president finally made good on his promise to ax it, and you remember the protests, how people fussed and fumed for three weeks before something else urgent and unjust overtook the national limelight. You remember the rage and also the relief — relief because you were at last free of the guillotine that hung above you, because some awful clarity finally sliced through all those years of maybe, if you’re good, if we feel like it, and the legal revocation tasted more like a cure than a poison.

When the elevator opens and the receptionist waves you forward, you’ll say, I would like to turn myself in for deportation.

When the receptionist tells you that you are in the wrong place, they don’t do that here, this is for biometrics only, try “Immigration and Customs Enforcement” on floor eight, you thank her and go downstairs and repeat yourself.

“Do you have a deportation order against you?” asks the person on floor eight. You give him an expired driver’s license and the deportation order that you do have, the one that has haunted you for longer than it has existed.

“This isn’t yours,” he says. He’s right, technically. The papers are addressed to your parents, not that it matters to them — they don’t live here anymore. “I wasn’t supposed to be here either,” you say.

“Unfortunately, a discretionary grant of voluntary departure is only relevant to people in custody. As you do not have a current or outstanding deportation motion against you, there’s not much we can do,” he says.

“Can you file one for me?”

“We are currently prioritizing the removal of criminals or repeat offenders —” he begins to explain. You cut him off.

“So you want me to commit a crime, then?”

Your own disdain and brusqueness toward a customer service employee doing their job surprises you a little.

“Miss, you are free to leave the country as you please.”

In your head, you go through the list of your personal lows, the things that could be flagged as criminal within certain shades of the law: Contributing five dollars to a senate campaign a decade ago because you didn’t know that you would be a foreign national interfering with democracy, driving without a permit, driving under the influence, driving over a hundred miles per hour that one time, being cruel to your parents.

“Listen,” the receptionist says. He scans the empty waiting room. “I can tell you’re young. It’s not your fault your parents broke the law. You remind me of a gal my son went to school with. It’s real unfortunate that good kids like you are in this situation, but you’re not helping yourself by coming here like this.”

Your body heats up at this insipid take. It’s insulting to be seen as a child when you are more than old enough to have one yourself. You have already dissected the “good immigrant kid, bad immigrant mommy” dichotomy spouted by every hopeless lip-service legislation. You have already deconstructed the framing of who is entitled to citizenship and who must beg for it. You have already analyzed the national amnesia behind who exactly started the wars, plundered the resources, and overthrew the governments elsewhere to necessitate so many of you coming here in the first place. But America isn’t ashamed of its imperialism, so you won’t apologize for squatting.

“All right,” you say.

You walk back to the elevator, past security, through the revolving doors. You step into the stark sun, no ankle trackers or hand shackles or deportation orders in sight. If you want to leave a country that doesn’t want you, you’ll have to do it yourself. In the parking lot of the USCIS office, you book a flight on your phone.

It takes six minutes.

Third, you go to Walmart.

You could have ordered everything online and a drone would have dropped your items off in four hours or “your money back guaranteed,” but you craved the full Wally World experience. You wanted to glide down the cool, fluorescent aisles and pick up bags of candy, rub the sleeves of polyester sweaters, flip through cheap paperbacks. Time and weather don’t exist inside a Walmart, but cell reception does. Your phone vibrates with your mother’s name. She’s calling from another time zone.

You answer in the language she knows best and you know barely. Now that you are an adult, your mother speaks to you over the phone with soft authority and sudden humor, neither of which were displayed during your childhood. You ask about her health and she asks about your upcoming flight. She tells you not to be nervous. She likes giving impractical advice: don’t be stressed, don’t be sad. You pretend to heed it. She asks where you are and when you answer, she says,

“Walmart! Remember when I lost you there? I searched everywhere. Eventually, a kid moving shopping carts saw me crying while I kept circling the parking lot. He took me inside to customer service and there you were, sleeping behind the counter. Someone had taken you there because you were lost. When they asked you for my name, you kept saying ‘Mom’ because you didn’t know my name. I didn’t know enough English to realize that they had been calling for me over the intercom the whole time. I still don’t.”

You were four then, this being right after your family had immigrated. You don’t remember the incident firsthand, but you like hearing the story of how your mother came back for you. You remember how grocery runs were always a group activity in your household, how there would be months of only traveling between school and Walmart and home. Little did you know that those days would turn out to be the good times, that you would fall asleep wishing that you were small and in the back seat again, listening to your parents bicker on the way to Walmart.

Before your mother ends the call, she asks you to pick up some vitamins because they’re cheaper there. You let her go and you return to your shopping list. You pick up boxed wine. Handles of vodka and six-packs of beer and two bottles of the cheapest champagne. Frozen mini pizzas and mini corn dogs and mini quiches. Chocolate peanut butter cups because they are your best friend’s favorite. With each addition, your cart gains momentum.

In the pharmacy section, the lightness of your nostalgia begins to churn into a familiar anxiety. Walmart is both a living monument of your boring rural childhood and the crux of many evils: the costs simply don’t add up. Before you lost your scholarship and dropped out of college, you sat in lectures with rapt desperation, hanging onto every word on Marxism and congealed labor and the co-optation of race and borders and citizenship. You cared about being politically correct then, thought policies would save you, thought the distinctions between labels like “illegal” (bad) and “undocumented” (inaccurate) and “illegalized” (bingo) mattered, and you took great care to categorize yourself properly. You don’t think about those words anymore; they don’t have any sway over you when you’re about to quit America.

Somewhere between the fish oil and melatonin aisles, your sentimentality gets the better of you, so you briefly abandon your cart to go on a pharmacy ride detour. You step into a Dr. Scholls’s orthotics machine. You shove an arm down a blood pressure monitor machine. As the inflatable cuff tightens around your left bicep, you marvel at how all the Walmarts have the same identical layout. You hate Walmart because you should — you’ve held onto your anti-capitalist principles, after all — but you love the familiarity of this place, the way all Walmart entrances begin near the produce and end with clothing and plastic jewelry. Once, your best friend called from Los Angeles to complain about how it took her three trips to buy toilet paper, a tube of tomato paste, and a pillow. Here, it’s all in the same place. If there was a heaven, you think, it would probably look a lot like Walmart: everyone you love and everything you need in one place, within arm’s reach.

Before you check out, you grab a headlight and twenty cans of lighter fluid.

Fourth, you throw a pity party.

After giving away the few furniture items and plants you possess, you’ll guilt the recipients of your redistributed inventory to gather at your place in lieu of payment. You take three shots of tequila before anyone shows up because that’s when you’re the most fun.This small, throat-burning sacrifice is necessary preparation because you are the host, the mood-setter, the cause for this going-away celebration. If you look like you’re having a bad time, everyone will follow suit and then you will have accomplished the truly unforgivable: thrown a shitty party and wasted everyone’s time. You want to go out in a drunken splendor, want everyone to kiss and cry and promise things they can actually deliver, like calling their grandparents or finally opening a retirement account.

But of course, you overdo it. Two hours later, you’re the only person who isn’t sober. Half your friends are cursing the government and the other half are slouched against the wall, mumbling condolences, trying to be polite and non-partisan. Everyone’s drinks are full and their plates are sparse. The vibes are rancid. Agitated, you scramble up the last chair remaining in your studio.

“Evening, comrades! Thank you for coming. I expected you all to pregame for this but no matter,” you slur. You gesture with your drink and start rambling. In the periphery, your best friend’s face twists with exasperation and you smirk because there’s nothing you love more than annoying her with your theatrics.

“I know,” you continue. “But here’s the thing! The motherland will not be so terrible. Countries with universal healthcare and affordable public schools do indeed have their pitfalls! The taxes will be higher and the salaries will be lower, yes. But life isn’t all about financial gain, friends. It will not be so —” (you burp) “— awful.”

“Bitch, shut up,” your best friend shouts. “We’re sad because we’ll miss you!”

“I’m not done,” you shout back. “A toast! I want to make a toast!”

You make serial killer eyes at everyone in the room until they reluctantly hold up their drinks. “I hate this country so much,” you say, meaning every word. “And I love you all so much,” you add, holding back messy drunk girl tears. You continue.

“This is actually a happy occasion. Imagine: I’m finally leaving a super terrible, toxic relationship with a power-trippy maniac who threatens to kick me out every day. Except instead of a person, it’s a nation-state.”

“To leaving nation-state fuckers behind,” your best friend hollers, and you scream “Yes, exactly!” and chug your assent. You keep pouring and drinking until everyone gives in and gets drunk-sad and hysterical-happy with you.

You’ll wish that everyone could stay in this room forever, but of course they won’t. They can’t — eventually they kiss your forehead and collect their things from the pile by the door and leave for their own beds, one by one. When you finally lift your head, it’s two in the morning and you’re on the floor, curled under a coat that’s not yours. Your best friend has cleaned up all the red cups and paper plates on your behalf, and she is now mopping the sticky kitchen floor. The sweet smell of her perfume on her winter coat makes you feel even more drunk. If she was dealt your cards, she could endure it, you think. Unlike you, she carries herself with the self-assurance of someone who knows they belong to themselves. You make a disgruntled sound and she slides next to you, her face upside down. Your best friend, your kinder and hotter and smarter half, the one friend who didn’t abandon you after getting married. You say this out loud.

“Marriage doesn’t mean I have to renounce friendships, moron,” she says. She sighs and closes her eyes. “What are you going to do over there?”

“Hang out with Mom and Dad. Teach English. Get paid to write rich kids’ college essays. Save enough money to get a boob job and then marry rich because I won’t have any friends over there so I might as well. Profit.”

Your friend rolls her eyes. “No, really.”

“Dunno. Just going to live,” you say, drifting back to sleep.

You tried living here but you are finally ready to admit to yourself that it has all become too difficult. Once, you explained to your friend what Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals really meant: the government was just stalling, it was never meant to solve any part of your predicament. But all the while, you were stalling too. The thought of asking your friend to care for you felt intolerable, loathsome even, and instead you continued to love your friend in secret until that too became too lonesome. It whittled down your self-respect, hardened you in ways that made you look ugly even to yourself.

Even undeserving immigrants like you should get to rest every now and then.

Finally, you drive west.

At long last, you are ready to take care of business. You’ll drive through the night, playing yacht rock and licking Hot Cheetos powder off your fingers. When the fog of sleep creeps closer, drive faster and recite the facts from the naturalization test to stay awake. Tax Day is April 15. The national anthem is “The Star Spangled Banner.” There are twenty-seven amendments to the Constitution. Somewhere in the American heartland, there is an abandoned factory devoid of windows and warmth.

And that factory is special to you. It is a place that once produced seat belts and stamped all their packages with a Made In America seal until an ICE raid shut it down. The town where those factory workers once lived shrunk in real life and expanded in the space between your ribs until it became the ghost town it is now, and you became another restless apparition haunting it. At least, that’s what you’ll tell yourself as you drive around your hometown for the first time in years. You turn off the music and the GPS. The town’s sole grocery store, a place where your parents could never find the right vegetables or spices, has aged poorly even in the dark. You drive past the four-block stretch that makes up town, past the sunflower patches and cornfields, and make a left on a gravel road. You park outside the factory your parents toiled in for twelve years. Turn off the car lights. Step out and stretch under the moon.

You stand for a moment, letting your eyes adjust before scanning the empty space in front of what used to be a door. Your parents would eat lunch and smoke and mingle with their fellow immigrant coworkers by the picnic table a few yards away. They stayed in this town and worked in this factory even after you left for school. You suggested that they move to the city too, that there was no reason for them to stay behind, but they always resisted. They liked the countryside. They said it was peaceful. And truthfully, you liked the distance. You began to appreciate the freedom of living in a real city, far from your parents’ anxieties and expectations. Who could blame you? How could you not regret leaving them when they would soon be taken?

You study the lifeless building made of wood and steel. For years, you felt it was unfair that this structure remained standing even after all the people who once brought it to life were shipped off. It shouldn’t have surprised you. The only thing sacred in this country is property after all — but looking at the building still makes your insides burn. You click on the headlamp, take out the box of lighter fluid from the trunk and approach with a determined stride. You run your hands over the windowless siding and listen for raccoons, skunks, robins. Animals you won’t see for a long time.

You don’t believe in justice. Not really, not anymore. But you came here for a reason. You spray the walls of the old factory in fuel.

“I know this is pointless,” you say to the building, to the moon that hangs low and bright, to no one nearby. You gather sticks and wood scraps to make a trail leading several feet away from the building. Douse the path with lighter fluid.

“It’s not your fault or my parents’ fault or any one thing,” you say.

“It’s just. Every day they used to be so scared of living and working here. Every single day. They were afraid of everything — of getting injured, of me getting sick, of not being able to see me, see each other. Afterward, they told me they should have left sooner. Shouldn’t have come here in the first place.”

You walk back to the far edge of the trail of flammable debris.

“I miss them,” you confess. “Sometimes I think I might die from missing them. If I stay here, I won’t even be a person anymore.”

You take a step back. Light a match. Above you, the faint glow of morning peaks on the horizon. Below you, a tiny flame crawls toward your hands. You imagine the matchstick growing into a great fire, chasing you like a police siren, telling you to go.

Amy’s finally cleared up whatever’s been stuck in her throat.
Bless! Breaking news, she reports. Medicare now
covers kale at your farmers market where the flanneled eye candy
draws tarot . . . which, yes, is also covered. And isn’t law
enforcement a shit euphemism? Effective immediately,
firing squads have been gutted in favor of
gourmet school lunches, glitzy public
housing, and the highest-speed rail.
Immigrants, amnesty. Debt’s unconditional
jubilee. Plus, Juan’s not fumbling any of his lines today!
Keep your eyes peeled, he says, for Young
Lords U., overdue like the Land Back legislation
moving through Congress, though tribal leaders expect amendments.
Nermeen? Thank you, Amy. Nationalize is the word
organizers keep chanting: banks, the energy grid,
profit-maximizing hedge funds
quietly masquerading as universities. Also
reparations, the central demand of the general
strike set for next month.
Teachers, nurses, and auto workers
unions, at their unprecedented assembly, hammered out a platform
vastly more ambitious than pundits had imagined. Not us.
We’ve been waiting. War, war, ‘peace,’ war.
X-ray an empire and trace a backbone
yoked to misery, but not broken . . . not yet. A non-
zero chance is not zero.

1.

maryland turns into my mother’s favorite place.
she never moves there at all.

in the happiest life,
america is a rippling star

in a strange girl’s field,
her lips on my mother’s face,

saying,
everything leaves,

so stay.

2.

we’re in France again.
nobody stares.

in the metro tunnel,
then the wind,

bodies sway together,
bells warm in the air.

i climb the louvre,
momentous glass

in hand. i can
screenshot

the sun.
i can move

everyone.

3.

what task becomes at hand?
i’m higher than the bowl of greens

i ruined, mom,
last new year’s eve.

i meant to say
i’m sorry for this.

you climbed and gathered
all day, and i watched

from afar, taking dusk
for unfinished business

we couldn’t be
reborn into again.

at the end of this rope
stands another,

wider than God.

4.

under the eyes of good fortune,
she removed her nose/breasts

for love of art
and hatred of the crowd.

the sun is flatter
than God now.

5.

this exercise is meant for release.
palms down, hips up. release.

may we balance our way to an ending
we sure as hell don’t know; release

each other of configurations, teachers and co-pilots
of death anxiety, yawning open, release.

there’s some canine in the vacuum between us,
don’t you think, doc? teeth forward, seeking release

from the forms that brought us here today.
hips and lines of black boxes to sign: for release.

you’re smooth as water in the year of the rat, you know.
enough to spare relief, a hard place to find release.

i think i’ve got life anxiety.
what i am afraid of is release.

6.

where to go from here when once again you come press
your thumb against my asking mouth where i keep
these secrets interpretative soft open unkneeled poems
the unkempt pedaling me close and i mean really really close
on a bicycle to the end of the world we were falling on the nearest beach
we once strolled down the oily dark the starlings on the chesapeake green
could you tell what it was what it held years to come years
to grow within she laid there like jellyfish in a corn field strewn
transparent dendrites of yellow gold strained up towards the sky
her drying cells her wicked hair swept up against
a face i can no longer recall

at all

7.

wet rain
over a blanket

of ears

mother
who never landed

anywhere

It’s Monday morning, April 2020, and I am trying to see if my dad has had a stroke from 800 miles away. My sister sent a video. I cup a hand over my iPhone, but I can barely make out that tiny figure, trapped in the screen, moaning, shaking his head.

It takes twenty years away from home and a global pandemic to realize my dad is vanishing. Growing up in Seattle, I used to stay up till 6 a.m. going to raves, sneak back in the house for a nap, heading back out to spend twelve hours in the queer district for work and school. I figured Dad would always be there to see me the next time. After moving to San Francisco, I visited Dad once a year. We didn’t talk much during the between-times.

I play and replay my sister’s video from her text message. Dad’s speech slurs between languages, not English or Malay or Cantonese or Mandarin. His body slumps forward, one eye closed, chest immobile, while my sister asks him questions and he says something that sounds like “zzzzwawayouyou.” I talk to that tiny screen, say please go to the ER to rule out stroke. I call the doctor while my sister loads a water gun with simple syrup and shoots it into his mouth. Is it a diabetic seizure or a mini-stroke? I check text after text, send my siblings the stroke test. Is his face drooping? Can he raise his arm? Can he talk, does he know what time it is? A few hours later, he answers his phone.

“Dad,” I say, my voice hoarse, almost a whisper. I feel like I’m speaking to a different person, though I can hear his old voice through the static. “Yeah, Dad is okay,” he says. He even jokes: “I almost became a vegetable.”

The last couple times I left we hugged. Maybe even said “love you.”

I want to tell him how much I want to hear all of his stories — especially the ones he’s told and re-told again, how the family almost starved to death during the Japanese occupation, how he won scholarships to migrate to Montreal, Vancouver BC, and the Bay Area in the ‘60s; how he was a “halftime hippie” who spent the money on beer and records every week. How he and Mom met.

I don’t yet know that a month after the first hospitalization, Dad will have another episode. The nurse will tell my sister he needs to go to Skilled Nursing “if you want him to be able to walk again.”

In the midst of all this, I tell myself I will not cry. I am like a machine. A computer operating in recovery mode.

I won’t allow myself to think about being unable to reach Dad in that hospital room. All our unfinished business. For a year after I left home, I left many of his calls unreturned. Maybe I was selfish. I was tired, envious of peers whose parents expressed unconditional love, whereas Dad’s calls were filled with lectures about saving money and putting family first.

I won’t allow myself to think of him surrounded by coughing patients or an unmasked doctor, breathing in the virus. I cannot imagine him being ended by someone refusing to wear a 3 by 5 scrap of fabric across their face, not when he survived a world war that killed 6 to 10 million people across Southeast Asia over seventy years ago.

“Don't blame others, blame yourself,” Dad used to say while he crunched Cheetos in the living room and swilled Gallo wine fresh from the jug, KING-5 news blaring. He’d often lecture us about “taking responsibility” for our own situations. I took this to mean “don’t ask for help. Do it yourself.” He’d tell us about how he hitchhiked across Canada as a young man, sleeping outside in open fields or by rest stops, or sometimes in the Salvation Army to eat meals with his friend. Or he’d tell us about how he sold fruit as a seven-year-old in the relocation camp. “Later on, I learned it was very valuable,” he’d say of his childhood war camp job, because he would know “when the people doing charity would bring the porridge.” I felt guilty that I never had to learn how to eat fast, like Dad had. He’d slurp his food, store it by the bed or keep it in a separate fridge drawer, as if childhood malnutrition never left him.

During these tellings, Dad would then draw insulin up his orange-tipped syringe, tap out the air bubbles, and jab the needle into his thigh. He’d lay the syringe on a paper plate, the whole kitchen table already so cluttered with medicine and candies and newspapers. He was always in control. I would not see him passing out from hypoglycemia or over-injecting insulin until the pandemic. He was an older parent, 55 when he was diagnosed with diabetes.

I try to imagine Dad as a child, searching for silver scraps of fish that had hopefully not gone bad yet, not knowing when the war would end.

I wonder — while my teenage aunts stole sweet potatoes and my seven-year-old dad sold cut-up mangoes — did they think they would survive?

Dad once told me that during the Japanese occupation, soldiers “dig a big, long grave,” lining up and shooting Chinese-Malaysian citizens.

It’s April 2020. They’re digging mass graves in Hart Island, the Bronx. NYC hospitals are overflowing, and medical staff store hundreds of dead Covid patients in refrigerated trucks on the streets.

We have a reality-show president who chants, “Chinavirus, Chinavirus,” as nurses cover themselves in garbage bags and supply chains break and the same politicians who downplay the pandemic invest in body bags and PPE suppliers. In the first few weeks of the pandemic, I find it hard to breathe and hard to fall asleep. A part of my brain tells me that I won’t wake up if I fall asleep, so I try to delay it as long as possible

Zoom has become my life. I’m on deadline for school and work, but I can’t quiet my mind, I can’t do anything, my whole body going pins and needles. I keep picturing the Dad I remember drinking Diet Coke and shaking one leg after the other. “You see Dad’s legs?” he’d point at his backbent legs yet again. I know the story, how his legs bowed from childhood malnutrition.

Dad was born in British-ruled Malaysia (then Malaya) in 1936. We’re Hakka, the guest people. Our ancestors went through five waves of mass migration, surviving famine and fighting invaders, fleeing into the diaspora. Dad crossed two continents, moved across three countries, to get here to the States.

*

It’s now May 2020. After Dad’s next hospitalization, my sister will help bring him to Kline Galland Skilled Nursing, where he’ll stay for three weeks until June 10th.

I haven’t made this trip in twenty years and we’re still in lockdown. I tell myself I’ll sleep in the car or drive straight through for fourteen hours, but I keep picturing my car breaking down on that long stretch of highway between San Francisco and Seattle, by Mount Shasta where there is no cell service. I remember once driving my Geo, needle jumping the red zone, steam rising from the hood on the Bay Bridge, no shoulder anywhere, just praying the engine wouldn’t seize up as I clutched the steering wheel and counted my breaths and finally pulled off I-80, turned right onto Frontage road.

The memory still jitters through my body.

The following week, I check text messages from my sister.

This time, Dad’s been hospitalized.

I take a Covid test, wait for it to clear.

I’m Zooming for seven hours straight between work and school. Body numb. By night, I stand in the kitchen, glance at the sink piled high with mugs, a crumb-crusted plate, a couple of Ziploc bags. “I should fix this,” I think to myself. I walk to the sink, but cannot bring myself to turn on the faucet, pick up the sponge, squeeze a glob of detergent onto it. It’s as if someone else made this mess, some other me. I stand by the sink, not washing dishes.

Instead, I glance at the wire shelf, crammed with packaged food. A My Little Pony creature winks at me from the Mattel fruit snacks on the floor, her sherbet blue-pink-purple hair caught mid-toss. I rummage, rip open a packet, smash saccharine gummies into my mouth, wash it down with a shot of tequila. It burns. I tear open a new bag. Eat standing up, waiting for that sugar explosion, because my heart is racing while my 84-year-old diabetic dad is in a skilled nursing facility 800 miles away, re-learning how to walk, held up by nurses in plastic shields and gowns. Nothing and no one is coming to save us. I drop the crinkled wrapper in the trash, walk back to my room and flop onto my bed.

The velour blanket feels good as I curl inside it like a creature in a cocoon. I think about Dad in a hospital bed, left alone by the astronaut suits. Does he see anything, or is there just a blank wall or curtain? My left hand feels anesthetized, clumsy, as I type into the blank phone screen. My body shakes when I get up. I can’t sleep. My hot water with honey has been sitting so long it's gone cold.

Dad and his family were the lucky ones who survived the Japanese relocation camps. Would he survive this?

My test clears. I rent a car, ready to make the fourteen-hour drive. I’m packing, but I can’t find my suitcase, so I just throw my crumpled clothing into trash bags, pulling on my motorcycle boots, the ones I can’t bear to throw out even though they are so faded and cracked that they’ve started to tear, soles ground down on the edges. I check and recheck the oven, the door, the bathtub faucet, my head buzzing.

I hit the road, heart pounding double-time from caffeine. I turn on the radio, but it's all static. I can’t get a signal.

Twenty years ago, I returned home to Seattle for Dad’s triple bypass, but he didn’t die, as he said he might. No, he lived.

As I drive, I imagine Dad’s open heart surgery.

He lies back on the hospital table, wearing a flimsy blue gown. The surgeon grapples with her gloves, measures the clear liquid. She pushes the silver needle through his flesh, calls for the nurse, who stays by Dad’s side. His eyelids open and close, nostrils flare, but he doesn’t call for help. Dad doesn’t believe in asking for help.

Once he is asleep, the surgeon takes a blade and cuts 10 inches deep into his chest. She cleaves through muscle, then breastbone, till she reaches his heart. What does his exposed heart look like? It is pulsating under fluorescent light. It is still pumping, swimming in a small ocean of blood. This small muscle. She links it to the bypass machine, scraping a path through the artery. Dad is sewn back together with wire, which closes his breastbone. The machine will live inside of him until he passes.

June 2020. After seven hours on the road, I gulp coffee and keep going, round the mountains by Shasta, crossing the Oregon border, past Ashland, Medford, Grants Pass. I remember my recent dream — Dad climbing on the side of a mountain, rope tied around his waist, rocks tumbling beneath his feet. I remember bolting. Startled awake, my stomach twisted in on itself, as if I alone held the rope. I shake my head, crank the radio louder and hear spurts of “My Sharona” through the static followed by silence.

When I pull off I-5 into a Cottage Grove gas station, it seems like I’ve traveled back in time. Here, no one wears a mask — not the baseball hat-wearing dad carrying his daughter, not the barista at the coffee stand. My cell phone is in the red, charger busted, dead, though I’m scrolling through Airbnb to book a room because I’m exhausted and won’t get there past two in the morning.

I finish booking the room and pop open my tank. As I pump gas, I think about the small man in the White House blaming the “Chinese virus” as maskless crowds shout and protest. I keep seeing Dad among the hate crime victims.

When I look up, there’s a man staring at me. He won’t look away. I tense, ready to kick, my hand forming a fist, ready to scream if he lunges or spits or grabs at me, but instead he turns and gets back into his car.

When it’s time to pay, I kick open the glass door with my boot, enter the mini-mart, and ask the clerk, hidden behind Plexiglass, to add a phone charger. Everything in there smells like bleach.

Then I’m back on the road, driving through winding Oregon mountains, teeth chattering from too much AM/PM coffee. Rain drenches my ancient wipers as they struggle to do their job. I pull up to the Airbnb at 2:30am, run through rain splatter, barricade myself inside the industrial-chic studio with my garbage bags. I climb into bed at 3 a.m. still jittery, gritting my teeth, toying with putting my mask back on to sleep, afraid of coronavirus air particles. I’ll be no use to anyone if I die. I keep Googling and stopping: ”Man who ran over protesters is an admitted leader of the Ku Klux Klan”; “Top Trump official claims there’s no systemic racism”; and “Anti-Asian incidents across U.S. near 1900 over an 8-Week Period.”

After three insomniac hours, I get up. Splash water on my face, barely brush my teeth, load everything into the car. I feel like that quarantine Gremlin meme — by Day 30, the once-cute critter is now a lump of matted fur, its googly eyes half-scratched off.

On the road, everything is a blur of trees — evergreens, firs, spatters of rain. I swig more coffee. Gun the gas. The last time I was home a year ago, Dad told me a tree fell on the house and blocked the walkway. He was 83, hacking away with a handsaw till he cleared a path. Cut-up tree stumps still line our house.

*

It’s June 2020. It’s been two months since I saw Dad as a tiny figure crying and moaning without language, a monstrous version of the parent I once knew, trapped in a video screen. Now, I’m finally here to see Dad. Some of the travel restrictions have been lifted.

I turn off the highway and make my way down Seward Ave to Kline Galland Skilled Nursing. Everything looks so serene at the park nearby — the lake, all the evergreens, that piney scent, everything lush from rain. I pull into the parking lot. I imagine Dad inside that clinical room, his body so frail I don’t recognize him, barely covered in a papery hospital gown. “Don’t turn off the gas,” I think, as though I can run away, but it’s too late to turn back.

I sit in the car, breathing and gripping the steering wheel. Will myself to move my legs, to open the door, to stand, to leave the sanctuary of my car for this facility.

I walk through the sliding glass doors. The receptionist scans my forehead for fever as she runs through the coronavirus checklist. “No, no, no,” I repeat in their Covid questionnaire, a memory of cotton swabs scraping mucus from the back of my nostrils. A social worker leads me down the hall, the floor so slick that it seems unreal, a shiny other world. Down the hall, a nurse takes off her blue mask, smiles, and steps into the elevator. I insist on taking a different elevator. “Why is she mask-less?” The social worker I’m with explains that the nurse is on break and won’t be near patients, but I shiver thinking about the eight nursing home patients who died a few blocks from my parents’ house, along with the forty-three senior patients who died at Life Care Center just outside of Seattle last week. Shit.

The social worker leads me through another empty hall, to an open door, the room just curtained off. She knocks on the door frame.

I can’t see my dad, only hear the TV blaring from another room. Lights buzz overhead. A faint laugh track, then a commercial break. The room reeks of bleach and antibacterial soap.

We walk in, but Dad just stares straight ahead. Did he have a stroke? His face looks blank, eyebrows raised in that slightly quizzical expression we share, somehow. He doesn’t look much thinner, as I was afraid he’d be. “Mr. Chan,” she says, and he blinks, but says nothing to the two of us. Is he on medication? I don’t know if I should hug him, if I will breathe on him. I keep thinking I could have a false negative, the virus hiding inside my body.

Dad still looks the same, except no baseball cap, just the same ‘80s stonewashed jeans and a sweater this time. Lit by fluorescence, we move in slow motion as the social worker shows me how to help transfer him to and from the wheelchair. I wipe everything down with Clorox — the grab bars, the door knobs, all the metal gleaming. When the social worker leaves, a nursing assistant helps wheel him down the hall toward the exit. She is so kind to him, laughing and joking, hugging his shoulder, though he doesn’t react. Maybe he gives her a faint smile. I am a bad daughter beside her, stiff, awkward, not even knowing when to hug.

After we’ve walked to the car, after I’ve helped him into his seat, after he’s strapped safely inside, I turn on the engine and look at him. Is he still the same Dad?

“They didn’t give me any freedom in there,” he says finally, an edge or a plea at the end of his words.

This is the first thing he’s said to me. He barely spoke inside Kline Galland. He was so polite, it was like looking at a stranger.

“I had to buzz someone to go take a walk outside.”

I nod, not taking my eyes off the road.

I hope that he’s the same Dad who camped out under the stars in a sleeping bag, no tent in sight when we drove from Seattle to San Francisco over twenty years ago.

“They didn’t give me any freedom” gives me hope he’s back to his old self. But he’s more frail, needs my hand on his arm to steady himself while walking.

I don’t yet know that this stay at Kline Galland will be the beginning of a series of other medical incidents. I don’t yet know that I’ll be present for the next one, grasping Dad’s shoulder while I dial 911, yelling out into the empty space for help.

For now, I take the slow route home, gliding along Seward Park, passing by endless stretches of grass and water and people running, jogging, walking their dogs. As I make it to I-5 heading toward home, Dad falls asleep, baseball-hatted head slumping forward, sun-dappled hands curled in his lap. At least he looks peaceful.

I tore through the Target, Hurricane Hooper hellbent
on proving that his skin was
crisp enough, that the revered golden country
Fried belonged to the Midwest Dynasty
my father is a scholar in, all through the Lawry’s
seasoning-salt-and-spices-phantoms in the empty cupboard,
because what’s the point of being armed
with an oil emboldened pan if I was going to half-ass it?

And when the storm died down, crowned
with this sun swallowing pit, her echoed words
slam into me like the incoming SUV—
You didn’t look hard enough— loose stream of
frigid water trickling down my back
knowing my mother is a magician. She will
conjure that chameleon package of paper towel
from the unnameable jaws of heaven, sink teeth into
that vanilla golden morsel. The sky unleashes its
glacial gray arrows upon me, renouncing my failure to
uphold my family’s legacy lying on that sleek, crimson throne

until I am drifting back into that Target,
no shutters shielding the chariot from the storm,
routine razors of bodies filing by… sputtering inner simmering
oil. But know that the sun never truly sets across
this breadbasket empire, that we will pass down
grandma’s skillets used to carefully conquer home-cooked-corn
beef-cabbage, et al. until we crumble into stardust. Know
that I fed flames to my newly own, shone
through disbelief that Tender tethered to my hungry palms,

except do you really think I’m talking about
fried chicken? I wonder everyday how you strung
up sentimentality like a bundle of Christmas lights
through smokestacks and plants when they
make me grab its still smooth wrist, crumple
times I breathed in sunsets and washed it down with
a cherry coke, sever its connection ‘til wrinkled and
I can’t call on you anymore. I’m trying not to let them
win mama, trying to finish what I started frying
My Way with the garlic and pepper sprinkled
with precision into this sea of reflecting
lights I never knew could glisten such settled amber.

1. Start with a name

By the end of this pamphlet, you will be able to practice the art of waiting in three simple steps. The first step is to name your waiting. A name allows you to orient yourself within the experience. Please name the following, filling in the blanks:

Waiting for the water to boil     CERTAINTY     

Waiting for the bus to arrive     TRUST     

Waiting for the right person     LONELINESS     

Waiting for the right time     REGRET     

Waiting in traffic     SURRENDER     

Waiting in line     NECESSITY     

Waiting to live     RESENTMENT     

Waiting to die     ENLIGHTENMENT     

Brenda clicks the pen closed on her lips, reviewing her answers. She has a looming sense that they say more about her than she wants. Frightening. She looks up from the pamphlet in her lap to survey her surroundings.

There are eight other people sitting at various angles in various corners of the light-brown room. Five fake plants. Two stacks of magazines, the topmost of which boasts the headline “28 Shortcuts to Happiness in 2028.” One desk attendant scrolling expressionlessly on their phone. A muted TV displaying a slideshow of infographics, a queue of names and the time permanently bolded in the lower right-hand corner. It is 8:44 a.m., precisely.

Brenda turns the page in her lap, lets out a little sigh, and continues to read.

Experience of time is shaped by the waters you occupy. Some waters are swift and shallow. Others are languid and deep. Consider the essence of this specific moment. How is time flowing around you? What choices brought you to this depth? Why are you sitting still amidst movement? Erode your answers to the core. This is the name of your waiting.

The numbers on the TV quietly change to 8:45 a.m. The desk attendant calls out the first name on the televised queue.

"Jordan...Jordan. It is your turn." No one stands up. A few knees shift. Brenda glances up from her page. "No Jordan?" The desk attendant continues with a somewhat disappointed edge to their flat voice. "Moving along then. Stephanie."

A woman in a floor-length coat slowly stands up from her seat and ambles toward the hallway entrance. Someone opens the door from inside and Stephanie disappears behind it. Brenda returns to the page.

I remember as a child, waiting for Netflix DVDs to arrive in the mail, for the fish to bite, for my boobs to grow. I waited for my dad to come home from work, for thunder to crack, for myself to suddenly die. I experienced time as the color of pale sky, the tone of a wind chime, the shape of a gun safe. I named it all BLUE.

At 8:52 a.m., a man enters the room. He wears dark clothes, a red beanie, and white sneakers plastered in wet grass.

"Here for my morning appointment," he steams, out of breath.

"Jordan," the desk attendant greets him matter-of-factly. "Unfortunately, you’ve missed your time slot. You have been bumped to the end of the line."

Brenda watches how Jordan processes this information. How his hands become fists and then flex into stars. He exhales a marvelous breath of acceptance. "Alright," he says, slumping down across from Brenda with a resigned sigh. “At least I’m allowed to wait here.”

Brenda resumes her reading, reminded of the task at hand.

To name a passing moment is to assert the bedrock of your bones against the ticking clock. You are time-layered; a temporal sedimentation rich with anticipation, consideration, dedication and slowness. You accrete love and erode grief in a cycle older than any timepiece. To name your waiting is to say, “Hello, Time That Passes, I’m glad you’re here with me.”

"I've never seen you here before," a quiet but intent voice says, momentarily pulling Brenda back into the room. "I know everyone here and your name isn't on the list."

Brenda blinks at the man named Jordan who is speaking to her. He’s not wrong. "Oh. Yes..." Brenda says, feeling suddenly unsure about her decision to read in this particular waiting room. "I am waiting," she reassures him, "just not for an appointment," she finishes unconvincingly.

"Okay?" Jordan says suspiciously. "They have something else here besides appointments?"

"Well," Brenda says, hesitating, "I’m here because of this." She holds up the small, nondescript pamphlet from her lap, its appearance characteristic of pandemic publications made by those with access to printers during the 2020 lockdown. Stamped in the corner of the hand-folded cover is a digital alarm clock with a shattered screen reading 9:99 a.m. Centered in bold is a title: The Art of Waiting.

"Ahh. You're one of those," Jordan says, taking Brenda in with raised eyebrows.

Brenda looks back at him, deciding how to respond. "I am not exactly sure what you mean by one of those… I am a journalist. I’m reporting on the public response to the recent executive order. You know, the anti-waiting law. This little pamphlet is having a major comeback for obvious reasons. I'm sure you've heard?"

"Psh. Have I heard? Of course I've heard,” Jordan says dryly. “You know, they used to leave that pamphlet in our waiting rooms when it first came out — what is it, eight years ago now? Ha!" He chuckles, remembering something. Brenda suppresses the urge to ask what he’s thinking, practicing her hard-learned journalistic patience. "They didn’t realize the weight those papers held until they criminalized waiting in public spaces,” he adds. “Have you got to the third part yet?"

Brenda shakes her head, wondering what this little pamphlet meant to him.

Jordan leans his head back over the chair and closes his eyes. "Just you wait," he sighs knowingly. "Just you wait."

*

2. Decide how to sit

"Sara!" Timothy yells from the bedroom suite. "Sara! Have you seen my glasses? I can't read without them!"

Timothy rummages loudly through his mahogany nightstand. A shaft of pale morning light freezes his unmade sheets into stiff satin peaks. Dust floats half-alive across the chamber. Timothy grumbles, bending his aged knees to look under the bed.

"Just use ChatRead," Sara yells from the living room in a distracted monotone.

"I know, I know," Timothy mutters, more to himself than anyone. "The act of reading is so archaic and time-consuming. Sue me for wanting to remember HOW IT FEELS TO READ."

"You go on then, babe," Sara encourages from the living room.

Timothy searches for some minutes in the dresser and glances into the walk-in closet before finally plopping down into his well-worn armchair with a sigh. "ChatRead," Timothy says dejectedly. "Continue reading The Art of Waiting.”

"Hello, Timmy," an ethereal voice says from everywhere and nowhere in particular. "Happy to read with you today. I will begin where we left off. Did you remember your tea?"

"Yes. Yes, I remembered my tea, goddamnit," Timothy mumbles to the empty room.

"Alright. Here we go."

The second step to the art of waiting is deciding how to sit. There are many ways to sit: in a chair, on the floor, over your heels, in the dirt. You can sit across from someone or alone, or silently slouched over a phone. Some sit by standing, which is not exactly sitting, but can hold the same intent. How you decide to sit reflects the name you give your waiting.

"Timothy, can you turn it down?" Sara yells from the living room. "I can't hear the morning news. It looks like there was another riot in the Park last night. By those Waiters. I guess that's what they call themselves..." She pauses, presumably to take a sip of coffee. "You always turn that thing up so loud. Might be time to get hearing aids, honey."

"I can hear just fine, honey," Timothy replies over ChatRead's disembodied voice, which he’d refined to be softly accented and richly layered. It reminds him of his late wife, though he would never admit this to Sara. She already knows the depth of his grief for Beth, which still hasn’t found bottom eight years after the fact.

Occasionally, the oppressive enforcement of time leads an individual to lose all awareness of the poetry of sitting. These individuals most likely regard time as a set of red-god-eyes glowing from their wrist, phone, and microwave, compelling them thoughtlessly onward. They are encouraged to glide seamlessly from task to task without the burden of wasted time. Waiting is slated as vestigial and wasteful. They forget how to sit. This concept is not only incorrect, but also dangerous to our freedom.

"I don't want to hear that nonsense, honey. You know it's a bunch of dangerous propaganda," Sara yells from the living room. "The lady on the news said her son's best friend's uncle went to prison after reading that pamphlet. If you aren't careful, you'll become a criminal like the rest of those Waiters. I don't understand why you are so intrigued by this uprising."

Timothy stares out the window at the dry fields rolling freely toward the horizon. He recalls the last time he saw snow on those fields, at least a decade ago, before the pandemic that claimed Beth’s life. They had spent an entire day building a larger-than-life snowman. It was so tall they had to use a step ladder to adorn the face by moonlight. The next morning just before sunrise, they crunched their way across the field with steaming mugs of coffee in hand to rest their backs against their enormous creation. He sat next to her and sipped in quiet anticipation. At last, the sun peeked over the horizon with an incredible exhalation of light. Even Beth somehow shone brighter that morning.

With a sigh that briefly fogs the glass, Timothy returns to the current morning. The window reflects his old, wrinkled face over the tired brown earth with a weary similitude. Tree skeletons reach solemnly skyward at the edge of his favorite creek, water trickling quietly through the end of yet another warm winter.

Time passes regardless of wealth, status and power. There is no way around it. You are simply immersed. You can sit with intention or you can drown.

"There is nothing else to it," he says quietly to the room. “How unbridled every morning felt, sitting next to you.”

*

3. Do not be fooled by urgency when you are a rock

Seldom wakes with a start, hand already snoozing her tired phone alarm. There are never enough hours to sleep. With a yawn, she rolls onto her side, swiping her phone open to text Justin back.

Seldom clicks her phone black and rolls onto her back, defeated by a week of overtime at the clinic followed by supply runs for her friends at the Park. It’s like the third part of the pamphlet says: “You simply cannot rise before you learn to fall.” She stares at the dust motes napping in her precious morning light. Stacks of books, notes, lists, and receipts accompany her body on the sun-dappled bed, as though they too desire a place to rest. “I am ready to rise,” she says out loud, practicing.

With a long stretch, she reaches for the radio tucked under her bed. It is compact, about the size of a good book, all silver and black with a faded sticker of a broken clock on the back. Justin gave it to her eight years ago when everything stopped moving in lockdown. He told her it was something old to commemorate how the times were indeed changing.

“It’ll still work in 100 years, Sel,” he had said excitedly over the phone when she found the package he'd tucked behind the flower pot on her building’s front stoop. “Radio waves are timeless. If we don’t make it through this pandemic, at least the waves will.” She remembers laughing with Justin over the phone, tears in her eyes, afraid of everything that was changing.

She sighs and pushes the power button, extending the little antenna. The radio is always set to 99.9AM, the local frequency over which the best morning broadcast reigns, complete with jazz, weather and more recently, the daily Waiter update. “It’s 9:99 a.m. here at 99.9AM,” the broadcasters say at the start of every show, “Our time.”

This morning, her favorite voice is wrapping up the daily update with a reading of the third and final section of The Art of Waiting pamphlet. Seldom lies quietly in the pool of her bed, letting the rhythm of the words settle over her tired form, one little moment before the inevitable movement of her day must begin.

“The third step comes to us this morning in a poem,” the broadcaster begins.

If time is a river, why run on shore?
Wade into the current, a little bit more
Sit down in the flow on the endless bed
This may take some time depending on swiftness and depth

You may feel pressed to hurry out and run with the clock:
Do not be fooled by this urgency when you are a rock
No heat nor pressure can match that which transformed
Your eroded bones into eons-old stones

Stronger are the seconds that stall upon your form
A sediment becoming you before you were born
Where the current is swift, you grow heavy; where it is deep, you grow tall
You simply cannot rise before you learn to fall

And in this moment where you sit and wait
For hunger, pain, and grief to dissipate
With no escape, weary heart becoming older,
Know that time is with you as you grow bolder.

“And that’s a wrap, folks. Catch us waiting in the Park until we simply cannot wait a minute longer to rise. Wherever your day takes you, we hope it rocks.”

We’ve come to Des Moines for the funeral. Fitting
place: I’ve driven through every time I was leaving home to live
somewhere new. A world without you. It is quiet
and just three of us remain

after the ceremony. We drink
beer in the motel room, the boys sitting on the end of the bed
and my back numbing against the bathroom doorway.
We toss the empty cans into the bathtub and the metal,

each time, catches the light in a way that glints
through the room. I remember the sculpture
in Chicago, years ago. Candy in gold wrappers
flash in the white gallery’s fluorescence, fill wherever

they’re poured into. A memorial,
though no one walking by would know it.
The museum label said there is always
sweat in-between the pieces. Even when we finish

every can, I know they will not amount
to anything — still I want to tell the boys
how this metal is almost gold like that — how much
money museums will pay to help us remember one

another, to be able to say that they did. Museums you’d have hit
me upside the head for mentioning. When the boys have gone
to bed I climb into the bathtub to hold you tightly, pull
the shower curtain off a handful of its hooks

on my way down. It slowly sways, a flag
at half mast in the green dark. A crack of cans
beneath my weight. I lay my forehead
on the dewy metal. I am noticing everything

just like how you would. I am watching
in the night. Next to the sink is a hand towel stained
by the leftover rotisserie chicken from the funeral,
some pieces of it spat from damp mouths

onto the cans. The meat — and me — a mess atop this aluminum
spectacle. In dim light, I lift myself onto the toilet seat
and look down at the shape of my body
in the middle of this memorial for you:

why should memorials be permanent — so people can come
mourn you forever? There is no one else
remembering the person I knew.
The two of them are asleep in what

streetlight draws through the shut blinds. For you,
I watch their figures tuck into one another. How an arm
sticky with beer, shifts over a hip apparent only in its bright
crescent of skin. Natural, natural,

like love is a thing bodies do.