Connected
 
Your body consumes the protective layer
coating the nerve fibers of your brain. 
Demyelination and you are late,
distracted, coffee grounds scattered —
I don’t know when the cutting board was last cleaned.
Crumbs and a half-eaten banana,
a bowl of oatmeal congeals, my beautiful sister.
The irony of your brain, among all others, having poor communication skills.
 
Your whole life people have shed their shells.
To connect with you is to be fully beheld
friends and shop clerks and an old man bent
weeding in the park because he needs to be useful and he misses his wife,
you ask and they answer because no one ever asks.
You are warm and you soften their sclerosis, render it unnecessary;
none us need to feel vulnerable
because we all are. 
 
But you are always late and even our mother,
who loves you like you are still the silk-haired girl in a pixie dress,
is so annoyed                                      by the misfires,
the lapses,
in consideration or in synapses.
You drive me crazy and I lose time,
conversations that peter off into meaninglessness, the jumping
around that makes things nonsense,
the unreliability of your promises. Money and time,
there is so much waste,
your disability is dirty and annoying and frustrating
and it will shorten your life,
my god, my grief, my sister.
 
One time we were on an island in the Strait of Georgia, the ferry had docked
27 minutes earlier and in the grocery store where we’d never been
the clerk greets you by name and you send your best to his kids,
“Oh, I met Tim in the parking lot,” you said.
One time we had chocolate cake for breakfast
because our parents were gone and you were in charge.
One time we played Scrabble and looked up H-E in the dictionary because we thought
it might be a measure of distance in China and our father watched quietly
as we read out loud “a singular masculine pronoun” and snorted giggles as he shook his head.
One time I was as alone as I’d ever felt and you slipped your ring onto my finger
and I wore it for years because I knew that somewhere in the world you loved me.
My life has been held by you in every way a life can be held.
 
And you could be me, because this misfiring is genetic roulette,
lightning striking
    and maybe it is because you stood tall
  and taught me how to talk and held my weight
as I swung from your hands,
you rose up with feathered
hair and so tight jeans
I had to help pull up the zipper while you inhaled
and you shone,
like a new star,
like golden sunrise,
       a gleaming strike rod on a skyscraper
 
We drink coffee in your garden, nothing unspoken.
Apple leaves hold tightly to branches as wind stirs and shadows flicker sunlight
dark, bright                 dark, bright                  dark, bright
Our long years lived together, each moment a fiber stretched, pulled taut by our remembering
There is a place deep in my chest where a laugh bursts,
traveling a live wire through time.
 
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Lessons for Future Housewives (inspired by Carl Phillips)
 
In early 2000, I flew to California from Michigan to record interviews with my grandmother. She was a perpetual student, an artist, and enjoyed animal movies, Jazzercise, and having her way.  When she had arrived at UC Berkeley in 1938, the lay of the land required a particular form for Chinese women, a cultivated acceptable other. Her friend described that period of wearing cheongams to faculty parties as being a “dancing bear,” noticeable but pleasing to observe, exotic but modern, like two pressed sides of a razor sharp trouser crease. It made sense that when Nana was old, she chose to be fierce. It was my second year of grad school. I had no idea how to be a historian, and when you’re new to something, everything feels like drowning. It is only later, after decades of oral history practice, that I can truly appreciate her recalcitrance. Whatever question I would ask, she would push back.  I began the interview with “Nana, I wanted to ask you…,” she cut me off and said “I already told you a lot of things. What, you want me to repeat the same old things…should I say those things [like] racial prejudice so bad?” You can hear me sweating if you play back the audio cassette. I wanted her life story, so I would ask questions and she would talk about whatever she wanted. It was like walking through a museum in the dark, accompanied by a flashlight that would flicker off and on, shining on different objects in every direction. It was only later that I recognized her curation as narration, and understood that everything I needed to know had been illuminated.
 - Berkeley, 2000
 
Somewhere, people still must do things like iron
sheets to snapping smoothness, hot steam rising to curl
small hairs on damp necks as each unintended texture, some gods idea
of what is supposed to be gives way to smooth expanse.
Like my mother sewing itchy eyelet lace in straight straight stitches
along the collars of matching dresses for her girls, polyester floral print of pink and purple
so practical because they never wrinkle even if they feel like penance
like hairshirts befitting a maypole of joy that scratches and reddens, what a terrible idea
to make fabric that only feels right if you are not wearing it. What is it that we love
so much about flat sheets and straight hair and smooth foreheads
like a shape can have a moral value, straight like a compass needle pointing North
                        and there it is, again, like always, that thing about places where the sun
burns hot, about coarse hair and brown skin and communities that undulate with connection, smelly food, through all those cousins, aunties, family trees that meander on curved branches of not-descent.  The nuns, they teach us about ironing, you know, to iron. We know the word but we don’t know what they’re talking about but they mean to iron clothes. My grandmother in missionary school, in China, 1925, learning English and how to lie flat.

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