Snowstorms

What tragic disorder, that

there is a heaven,

and you are alone in it,

in madness and blur,

beyond midnight of white skies,

you made of life.





calling yourself the left behind.

calling yourself stained sheets,

calling yourself wanton of the white.




You, a heavy pit of stones.

Pit of wounds,

Body, light, like snow.

Body, sharp — like unforgiving blade,

too difficult to kill.





Pain freezes in you,

a river of dry blood.





Leave them to wonder how your knees

got so heavy from the storm,

your bones, weightless

like air.


Heaven rains,

body, soaked.

Boots wet,

they cling to the trees,

they cling to whatever stays.

You cling to your body, fearful

you will lose it.





You must know better,

The hour is too late to be,

inviting yourself,

into heavy white graves.

Wicked at the core of being

Wicked at the core of her being.

wicked pain

wicked lonely

wicked laughter,

wicked body.

Wicked Romeo

with corrosive artful blue eyes,

theatrical ones that break

hearts into reckless tangled messes

remnants of art.

Wicked hunger, unable to swallow

Eats her like animal,

Absorbs the best parts of her

Spits her out,

undesirable

so she may not die again.

Wicked, beautiful disorder

unsheathes empty, infernal sinners out of solitude

Unchains the demon of lawlessness,

unchains himself.

Defies the devil’s medley

of sinking passions,

sinking souls.

Evaporates lustful heat

and silence.

Wicked who

inundates abandoned,

hollow minds

with covetous obsession,

and stupid rapture.

Petrified to be Godlike

The sky must be hollow.

Darkness was everyday crazy. She doesn’t know where she’s going, but she’s not lost. The distance doesn’t matter. She’s driving away from the monsters. The street lamps, silver. The black sky remembers the silver. She stares down at the pavement — she’s looks for hell, wonders if it exists. Wonders if it waits for her. She hates driving on the freeway. The wind is after her. She closes her eyelids- breathes in. The engine runs faster in the dark. She wonders why everything is always running. She counts the trees. There are fourteen. 14 minutes left of road. She wonders what flying feels like. She counts the stop signs as she drives into the dark. She doesn’t know where she’s going.

August

August does omit the same vibrancy as July

does not breathe the same lovely

refuses to entangle the world around heat and shared laughter

August reeks of empty goodbyes, 

of brokenness 

unfinished jigsaw pieces

of fleeting yesterdays, 

slipping out of my reach 

Uncapturable 

I want to enclose them in a timeless record 

replay it until the sound shatters
August indulges on lonely chess games
crafting different realities for each move I could had made
the mind is a dangerous trigger

August consists of reincarnating the past, 

performing autopsies on delicate moments, 

reliving what I should have said, should have done, 

August accepts logic over self-invented impossibilities

does not believe in returning to the moon 

August did not break me, 

I broke my own goddamn self. 

it was the winter

disclaimer: This poem is not about me.

It was the winter she returned to the yellow sidewalk

where she had once carved her name in permanent pink chalk

next to a yard of roses that had bloomed in the summertime.

But this time her boots only found weeds and broken twigs,

just the letter E seemed to survive the rain.

And its vibrancy faded into a now delicate visibility,

unrecognizable.

It was the winter she returned to my drawers in my mother’s home.

She breathed in the vintage perfume,

let her bruised hands slide down her once favorite dress.

The scent of someone she used to know lingered in that room,

nostalgic, like an unfinished jigsaw puzzle.

She let her fingers innately run across off tuned piano keys,

as they emitted a familiar rhythm,

a reminding vibration that matched her own pulse.

But she is too captivated by her hands,

how they can play with such perfection

even when she cannot recognize these notes.

Sometimes small glimpses of the past return,

quietly, ghosts reincarnated into shadows,

the gun, the war,

The last rose,

blossoming in the center of his shirt,

But that was a different life,
that was a different life.

Fireworks

I dug out this poem. It is the first one I ever shared.

On June 23 1982, Chinese American Vincent Chin was beaten to death the day before his wedding. 

Dear Vincent, you

they say your skin was painted too dirty to be worth anything, 

they colored you different 

you, they saw your eyes were too slanted to be recognized as human, 

they saw you different, 

And as they ran after you, 

you were not surprised, 

you always knew they were coming, 

So when they got to you, 

when they got to you, 

I watched as they split your head open with a baseball bat, 

as it splat, striked open, 

crackled like fireworks, 

I know how it feels

I've been there too. 

I go there in the lonely nights, 

in the years I dedicated to writing hate about myself, 

In the years, I cursed my name, 

 hated the way it sounded, how I dreaded the silence before teachers attempted to articulate the "Xuan" in "Wenxuan." 

it sounded too foreign,

so I crafted the letters into something more American, hide behind a curtain of assimilation. 

But when you died, 

the sun rose once again after the darkness of nights under the silence of the Chinese exclusion act, 

the Japanese concentration camps

I was there as your spirit danced in the moonlight, 

illuminated, 

the brightness of your skin, 

burned as we colored you hope, 

we colored you magnificent. 

because in 1982, 

your death gave life to the fist ever widespread Asian voice all across America, 

As we all, 

Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean,

all cried out your name. 

Dear Vincent, 

can you see us in all our different colors, 

the fire in our voices lighting up as we elevated towards the sky, 

crackled like fireworks, 

Dear Vincent, 

when they say your eyes are too slanted, 

you tell them about your lover, 

how beauty was in the eyes of whoever could be hold her 

looking at her 

looking at her was just too much for you eyes to endure. 

Dear Vincent, 

Im sorry they stripped you from love, 

Im sorry I didnt speak up earlier, 

when I was there.

wrote this in the honor of poet plath

I'm drunk off sadness,

of the taste of burnt ashes, 

thumb like onion sheds

bone like crooked teeth. 

I paint myself on finite horizons

walk on the sky because I'm looking for heaven

chug down sulfuric acid

maybe ill explode like stars

The silence screams: save me.