.EyeSpy.

here we are         again         swallowing all the city’s fog as though the universe will only end when it’s run out of things to steal and reproduce as something new so we’re good

who does sadness turn to when the moon finally explodes after all these decades we are starting to smell like all these decades

I’d like a room of taffy- colored pillow fights and peacocks. I’d like a fizzy lifting drink,

but they wanted me to choose: war or famine, to check the box for screams of the dying.

Make no mistake, we have already chosen. I caught the thin arm

of a Tarot reader bony and beckoning. In the dark, she had

dealt a new deck, she had the cards spread out:

i. and asks what it’s like to live in the desert surrounded by cacti, except she says xương rồng: dragon trees.

On the way to the bus stop, I tell her I count two with hooked spines, one with short barbs deceptively fuzzy and yellow like the pom poms on my grade-school hat.

Back then the bus stopped around the corner from our blue house and in winter, I skipped over the salted roads, nose in my scarf.

There was the morning I stepped in frozen dog shit and was last to get on the bus, the morning my mother drove by and pressed a book against her frosted window in question: Chicken Soup for the Pet Lover’s Soul, do you need this?

I shook my head so hard my earmuffs fell lopsided, a plea. The others laughed and delegated me to the seat behind the driver – the ultimate humiliation. But this, too, was a privilege.

ii.

In the background, I hear her yell to my father: Tuan, his name, means chivalrous, honor, respect.

When I was a kid, I told the kids at the bus stop my father went to prison once for 7 or 9 years, I could never remember. Something about the war, I said.

iii.

I tell her there are sweaty thigh imprints everywhere: on public transportation, in my office where the salt gathers in the well above my upper lip, the sound of my skin unsticking.

In the desert, they want me until they don’t want me here.

So, I talk about the internet– how there are videos of people jumping from moving vehicles into thickets of white cholla with their arms wide open on a dare or faith.

Or drugs, my mother says. Don’t ever think of doing that.

I don’t say: here, like everywhere, means getting confronted on the way to the bus because my dark hair, dark eyes all belong in somewhere-else.

is to turn twenty-four with an ass that refuses to fit squarely into a string bikini. to miss america is to miss the point of each perky, each taut muscle rippling its way across a wheat field. or to miss the wheat entirely. it is almost an art: paring

a strawberry into symmetrical slices for a midnight snack in front of the late night show. amazing how static can fill the mind, the gut. o america, i, too, have a stash of sashes, folded up & boxed, their ribbons too thin now for my frame. you don’t have

to tell me: this body is nothing like yours—spindly tower that knows its saunter, knows its shake. you strut down a lit aisle & miss the brush of grass against your knees. god, you’re as smooth as they make ‘em—teeth vaselined

like a slip’n slide, you are oil & bronze & glow. miss america, i, too, know about thigh gaps. i know what goes missing, the space between girl and grown. you miss dining room tables, fruit of your labor, warmth in your belly, warmth