Small, Crooked Things

I ate breakfast with my grandparents today. My grandmother sat beside me with two halves of whole wheat pita and an oily lump of cheese. She looked at me in between bites while my grandfather nodded through his coffee from across the table, his nose squished like an arrow pointing down drawing attention to his gut, pale and sagging, barely concealed by the thin shirt. My grandfather struggled to remember the name of a movie he watched four years ago and really enjoyed. For about eight minutes they argued about the main actor in the film.

The sky is flat and blue
I feel very hot in my wool sweater
I feel like Iran
The country, not the boy
I feel hot and dry
My tongue is sobbing in my mouth
It is wet with old
Saliva
I look out of my window and see
Stabs of green and pricks of yellow
All over, spread everywhere
So beautiful. And I

miss you.

Five people in my living room:
Short, asian
Tall, asian
Chubby, asian
Pretty, asian
Skinny, white
Pitching water bottles at one another
Where their balls sag
Except for the fourth one
(pretty, asian)
Who sits
Hand planted near her vagina
Weeping after laughing
She is so pink her panty line might explode

I am
the only one who now can see

past the swelling, tangerine sunrise
And the scatter of chubby stars, to where
My father slumps, easing sleep from his eyes
With knuckles, rough and pink, while my mother
Hums a warm, liquid tune of a long-lost life.

My tree, revisited

no attachments: all things go
Fi ve cle an chunks
across the lawn
one morning on my way
outside.

Hot-pink summers provide
Tan-crisp faces
Pockets scratchy with sand
and heart-biting, igniting images
of boys in bookstores, in buses
Stooped
over novels with jagged names

These darlings invite
lavender-pink daydreams
to feed the fat vacancies.
We imagine pathsm(cr)ashing
Love-sparks will zip free
So we, too, can leap

Then--
The heart-hack of beautiful boys
Who feign interest just to prove they can
Seduce us into a face-slam
With a pole,
Or an ouch- slip into a
ditch.

While rubbing raw bruises
And shrugging off wormy
dirt clods,
We will glance at them--strong--a phoenix
born from the ashes of heart-burn

And think:
Did the lumps in our throats betray our careless expressions?

I remember
Long, liquid afternoons inside my grandparents'
Shiraz home. My sisters and I
Skipped the spiral staircase, while my grandfather, small and round,
Wob-bled behind. And those slow nights of potato salad on hot bread:
I ripped out doughy middles and formed heaps on my plate. Then my grand-mother
glided past, warning me to
Feed the cats and feel the hunger
That poked their insides blue.
I am nothing
Without photos of my mother, my father
My parents
At the wedding my mother's hair curtseyed
My father still wore his hair
Proud and black and frosting-thick
With their thumbs they scooped up cake
But fed promises. Years later,
My mother
Is spinning away and
Unwinding. There are bits of her
Creased
In the laundry room, near the plastic baskets and the dirty bras,
Like mango holders. There are bits of her roaming with the house flies,
From one watermelon chunk to another.
And there are bits of her shivering in the May breeze
That smells like tulips and warm
pool water.