Out of the Margins

December dragged its slow funeral into the father’s
blue-blur hands. Car swerved past wind-torn highways,
through the family’s tunnels of hearts. The grandfather
pressed his head against car’s window. Anesthesia, early doses.

as my fever rides on
to a brighter & snowier peak
the tyrant of my heart texts me a HuffPo
article about the novel coronavirus

In her autobiography "White Métisse," Kim Lefèvre writes of her childhood and adolescence as the child of an unknown French father and a Vietnamese mother in Indochina and later Viet Nam. Being a métisse child during the turbulent period of rising nationalism, resistance to colonial power and war in Indochina, she becomes the unknowing lightning rod for the enmity directed at the French and those who collaborated with them.

News came to me of two men falling from the sky after having been birthed from the steel, burning carcass of their mother.

The restaurant and this building I was about to go into for the last time was where I learned to walk. It was where I learned to talk. And now I had to say goodbye. 

To move to another suburb, for another school, because the pre-school teacher said there were too many Asians at this one, that you’d develop an Asian accent, that a new environment was the only way to cleanse the tongue.