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Hong Kong Buddha whispers the name

Of my girlfriend,

Tells her to stop shopping after artifacts

Of her grandmother,

Knee deep in her past, wrestling

Parking structures out of rice paddies,

Sleeping

Ten to a room.

Apartments listing sideways over

Gorges of cultural dizziness

Draped with worn-smooth beaded rosaries

That ropeswing her over the cloud blue, slick, upturned eyeball slopes

Of her heritage to her

American home.

Rubbing together two chopsticks,

Dodging Catholic school--

She doesn't mind being lashed so

Securely to emotions that deny and define, giving taste

To sea breezes that connect these distant skies,

That recline over various sorts of genocide for which we have not invented words in tagalog or any other tongue.

Thinking hapa baby spoken with fresh lips unused to dominion,

Soft beneath teeth that ache to cut themselves on the razored truths of monied interests,

Milking equity to simulate belonging and thus to

Arrange the sky to blow between her selves in peace.