(after Thao & The Get Down Stay Down)
In the car going nowhere that matters
I hide tears behind sunglasses.
Tell me, how
do I make you proud?
I see them running
on the tarmac in Kabul.
Running to grab hold of the plane
already
taken off. No one
is dancing, Thao. Maybe
it’s the way Ocean says,
they are —
you were dancing
to machine gun fire.
It is 1975
cycling endlessly
through pandemic
through ecological disaster
through same old same old
man made war.
In an email going nowhere that matters
I reorder these words
to convince the same white men
let in the “allies”
the “women & children”
the “collateral damage”
to a new “home” they never asked for.
I see them running
on the tarmac in Saigon.
You never got on the plane.
You waited and waited and
waited and took your chance
by sea. On anniversaries
you tell me about the boat
the seven foot waves that so many
didn’t survive. You
never told me how you survived
and I never asked,
what died at sea?
It is 2021
cycling endlessly and your resentment my shame
something…………….has calcified
into
……….silence
between
.
.
us
……..I haven’t earned
……..your
………………..sorrow
…………………………….and it
………………………………………will
…………………………………………bury
…………………………………………me.
Phoebe Bui (she/they) is a queer Vietnamese Filipina American poet and researcher currently based in Laurel, MD. They received their MSc in Social Research Methods from the London School of Economics.
This is… brilliant.