In 1988 our fledgling nation drowned again in blood and clamshell clanging, oh how holy the flesh on pagoda stairs

I ask for a country, nothing else

On the night my parents met, I dream my mother dancing — water lilies blooming at her feet, my father’s lips spilling with rubies

At fourteen I make simplistic art for the love of oppressors

Mud clings to my brother’s legs as he runs from a ranine symphony, the croaking frogs drowning out the gunfire

When a thief stole our electrical generator, we forgave him and forgave him — all he’d wanted was light, was light

All we ever cried for was rain

My father is a revolutionary in a life salted with sorrow — a wooden house buckling under the weight of bougainvillea

I demand justice for the living, forgiveness from the dead

My mother hits her head on the doorframe and bleeds — a hand over my mouth, the taste of blood like sugar cane, sticking on my tongue

In 1940 my grandmother married a man who would sell her childhood home

All her life, on the verge of tears, babbling her tale to anyone who would listen, begging I want to go home I want to go home I want to go home

I imagine a greater world and sell it to the highest bidder

At six I tell my grandmother This is your home and there is your husband but I don’t know yet what exile means

In our dreams, my brother and I are back in that yellow-walled house, with its lone parlor
pillar, its marble backyard

They say Aung San Suu Kyi played the piano when she was under house arrest, her fingers poised over ivory teeth

In another country, my father doesn’t die choking on his own spit

Give us your broken, your limbless, your browning bodies crumbling into ditches; give us your rice paper sisters, your tea leaf brothers, your sesame seed children (one more for the pile)

In February 2021 I stop complaining about my country

When my grandmother dies in a stranger’s house, her daughter says I cried earlier — I want the women in my family to marry better men

In another country I am a poet who writes only about gardenias