She begins, and my grandmother joi… Mother and daughter sing like youn… If my father were alive, he would… his accordion and sway like a boat… I’ve never been in Peking, or the…

He gossips like my grandmother, th… with my face, and I could stand amused all afternoon in the Hon Kee Grocery, amid hanging meats he

Forgive me for thinking I saw the irregular postage stamp of dea… a black moth the size of my left thumbnail is all I’ve trapped in t… There is no need for alarm. And

I buried my father in my heart. Now he grows in me, my strange son… My little root who won’t drink mil… Little pale foot sunk in unheard-o… Little clock spring newly wet

There’s nothing I can’t find unde… Voices in the trees, the missing p… of the sea. Everything but sleep. And night is a river bridging

From blossoms comes this brown paper bag of peaches we bought from the joy at the bend in the road where we t… signs painted Peaches.

And when, in the city in which I… even my most excellent song goes u… andI mount the scabbed streets, the long shouts of avenues, and tunnel sunken night in search…

When I lay my head in my mother’s… I think how day hides the stars, the way I lay hidden once, waiting inside my mother’s singing to hers… how she carried me on her back

While the long grain is softening in the water, gurgling over a low stove flame, before the salted Winter Vegetable is sl… for breakfast, before the birds,

People have been trying to kill me… a man tells his son, trying to exp… the wisdom of learning a second to… It’s the same old story from the p… about my father and me.

Because this graveyard is a hill, I must climb up to see my dead, stopping once midway to rest beside this tree. It was here, between the anticipat…

In sixth grade Mrs. Walker slapped the back of my head and made me stand in the corner for not knowing the difference between persimmon and precision.