Sunday at Alemany Flea Market

Bernal Heights, sunlit morning
up early, I wander in & out of stalls
sprawled across a parking lot
set aside for the weekly farmer’s

market, vendors offer old VHS tapes,
saw bits & rusted blades, postcards,
an elbow patch in the likeness
of a heart, bound paper calendar

from four years back, printed
with wood block yantras,
a pinky ring bezeled with
the image of MLK who’s

birth the city remembers
tomorrow, objects of intimate
worth, talismans to the past,
transmitted in the remnants of

what other lives have treasured
a hawker bemoans struggling
sales in the new year, higher
fees for space rentals scaling

back to fewer days,
I listen to an exchange
take place in Chinese
reminded of my dad haggling

for his kid’s attire at the Colton
Swap Meet, my mother anxious to
go home, ready to walk away saw
only cheap goods, someone else’s junk

emergency poem

“After hundred of times of similar thunderstorms approaching…
you see them pass, you kind of get jaundiced about the warnings
and tend not to give them the weight you probably should”
– Jeff Lehr, reporter at The Joplin Globe

first week on campus an air horn
sounds at noon – the screech & wail of
an angry warning that can’t be ignored –
commonplace as earthquake drills
interrupting my youth (duck & cover on cue)

if it were real, an email
would have confirmed it;
I forego making phone calls
every Wednesday at lunch,
fall into an uneasy routine

so that when funnels do touch
down in Greenbrier, I don’t bat
an eye about showing up to meet
my coach at the rec center across
the road, the health club emptied

of all activity, when we find each other
he fingers a mass of swirling clouds
heading south towards town on a flatscreen
– all events on hold he’s been charged
with gathering up stray students, gym rats

huddled in the hall until the storm blows over
but I’d rather be crushed in my own home
with the one I love then be caught
dead remote tweeting about tree fall
or power outage – common sense

says the safest place in a storm
is on a highway, never mind
the part about lightning vs. tornado
strike – “I’m not responsible”
my trainer says outright – having made

one ill-founded decision to shift
from Lone Star to Razorback State,
what’s one more calculated risk?
given the gamble to escape Oz and
find a way back to Kansas –

wouldn’t we all take our chances?

swine

outside a sandwich shop
the boy with a scarlet dyed
Mohawk herds close to

his teenage brothers, shaved scalps
a tribal affiliation, I cannot
look beyond their bald heads

to see the red & white jerseys
emblazoned w/ wrathful ridge-
backed peccaries – an identity

formed around shirts not skin,
college football, plays games
with the mind hearing dogs

behind every chain-link fence
yap at me, as stray cats
present mice & hantavirus,

I have always been scared
witless of wildlife

Chitchat at the superstore

the cashier catches me
off guard when she wonders
aloud – I’m emptying out a cart
full of moving supplies: polymer totes,
packing tape, solvents to scrub
down a greasy stove, glass cleaner
for a bathroom mirror trying to see
things from her view, no polish,
I ask her to repeat the question
to make sure I hear her right:
Do you do nails?

I look down
at my own ragged cuticles,
gnawed nail folds feeling how
the heart wants to hammer down
the nail that sticks out, put her
in her place – this is not
my immigration story but why do I turn away –
thinking of Asian nail parlors in any town across America,
ubiquitous in Conway, there’s nothing at stake
I leave next week so choose
to state what’s obvious to my own mind
moving away from Arkansas – sorting
my bling into storage boxes

satisfied I speak English
she says she sees it
all the time at Wal-Mart
salon techs stocking up
on acrylic nail forms & fake tips,
organized into the same plastic cases

the tension dissolves between us
into recognizable decorum
bet the weather will be good
where you’re headed – bless
your heart, you live a good life

The Volta has a video poem piece that I created for them here. Poet-scholar Kimberly Alidio was kind enough to write about the poem here.

Kathleen Flenniken, the Washington State Poet Laureate, was kind enough to feature my work on The Far Field recently.

I would love to see more cities create object-based histories of where they've come from.