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That Night at the Rack ’Em Room

She talked me into a pool hall
strung out on tequila and cafecito
a gang of troubadours singing her praises
Damn, baby, you so fine!
as we walked in.

And she was. The kind of girl
who could get away
with Brazilian jeans.

I was coming off a bed-rest pregnancy—
skin stretched soft and loose
a half-racked game,
but with her, I felt bold
and pliable, shards of never-say-
never stuck in my throat.

I wasn’t good at geometry,
how to control the crash
of the cue ball, the candy-coated orbs
that scattered into constellations
across the felt, but she kissed me
for luck and took her shot,
all angles and elbows,
taking them down
with a click of the stick,
the suckers who lined up
just to watch her
bend over that table,
hair blazing a trail

toward the sun that rose
out of the low-slung horizon
of her waistline, a single dot
that chased its tail into a swirl
I rode, knowing even then
everything spirals downward
but she kept shooting me smiles,
sinking one after the other,
me along with them.

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Grilled

               For Sean

When you asked me why I loved you early into the morning
of a fight that had raged all night, I couldn’t answer, so I 
        asked you
for a grilled-cheese sandwich, a request that left you slack-
jawed and baffled as if I’d asked for a divorce instead.

I was the mouthy one but could not explain
what I saw in those sandwiches—the delicate balance
of starch and protein, white bread that braved direct heat
for the sake of cheese so flimsy it was dependent

on a framework of flour to keep it from burning
on the unforgiving surface of a wounded frying pan.
I thought it settled when you gave me what I wanted,
toasted gold streaming light on all the damage we’d done.

I never did tell you how I felt,
just chewed it all up, the love
you served on our best china.
Never once offered you a bite.

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What the White Girl Asked at Our 20th High School Reunion

Why weren’t we friends in school?

We weren’t friends because I knew
you hung out in the American parking lot
unlike my boyfriend who parked his Stingray
in the Cuban one on the other side of school. Of course
I hung out there. Not that you would understand
why being his girl meant I could not
sit in your car at lunch and listen to
your Def Leppard, your Mötley Crüe,
leave him to fend for himself.

We weren’t friends because he courted me
old school, couched beside my father
every Sunday while I served apprentice
to my mother, her eyes onion stung,
arms spattered with marrow and lard,
who worked at loving her place at the stove,
rules I had not learned how to break, yet.

We weren’t friends because I envied
the way you weren’t allowed to settle,
how you were encouraged to date
assorted breeds of boys who strutted
across the lawn to ring your bell. Your dad
waved his blessing out the door and didn’t worry
because he taught you to discern, to choose

among them, taught you to drive
yourself, headlights set on more
than the slam of the same car door,
even if it was a Corvette.

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What I Should Have Said, Instead

               For Zelda

I took you to Arby’s for lunch
to get you talking. Something about
that ten-gallon hat inspired courage
and you glowed like the cocuyos
we trapped in glass jars that summer
you were five and sure Papi was right
about everything, including me.

You unearthed confessions,
meteors that streaked past your lips.
Explosions—
I may not graduate.
We never use condoms.
He grabs, but almost never hits.

Geese do it too, tuck their heads
beneath a pall of fluff
to keep from noticing the danger
all around—Styrofoam cups
that fool babies into taking strangled bites,
silent alligators that prove lethal
beneath the green guise of indifference.

I ate your fries. Shoveled them down my throat
like a grave digger. I spun sugared sentences
into webs sticky with logic, but you swept them away
with bristles long practiced at the art of cleanup.

On the way home, I missed my chance
to get it right, missed the moment
when you asked me to go back
for the purse you’d forgotten on the table,
missed my chance to try again
as we pulled into the same parking spot
and walked through the same double doors
back to the moment when I got it all wrong,
missed the miracle of your purse, right
where you left it, still untouched, valuables intact.

I threw stones when I should have created
a pile, planted a rock garden, assembled
sentries to guard against erosion.
We could be there now—
weeds blooming into flowers,
talking about nothing,
nothing at all.

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BLESSING

The green onions on the sill above my window are sprouting again. I’m sorry for eating you, I tell them. I’m sorry for not planting you in soil. Sometimes I think they understand me better than anyone in Knoxville—how it feels to be rootless without C, what it means to grow happy only when the sun is out.

The green onions on the sill above my sink are more resilient than I am. I’ve been cutting them at the base now for the past six months. Each time their roots get a little more tangled. The tips of their green stems curl like fingernails. I change their water every day so they don’t rot.

The last time I visited C in Lubbock, we made fried rice with green onions. We cut the whites first, sautéed them with red peppers and shallots. We fried shrimp, added eggs, stirred in rice and basil, sprinkled the green onions’ tips. After we’d eaten, C took me to the backyard, where we stuck the green onions’ roots in an old coffee can. I told C how, in the evenings after she left Dad, Mom used coffee grinds to fertilize our gardenias. She hoped for blooms. She never got them. We hung the can of green onions on your fence. Three days later, I went back to Knoxville, and C promised to keep our green onions alive. For a few weeks, he did.

The last green onions above my sink died because I didn’t tend to them. That was eight months ago, in my first Knoxville house. I had just moved from Oregon and was flattened by the Southern humidity. I bought those green onions to make noodles, but without C, I couldn’t. One day I came out of my bedroom and found them soft, smelling like the food that, years ago, got stuck in the holes where my wisdom teeth had once been. For weeks, I couldn’t get rid of the smell, even though I threw those green onions out.

If I leave Knoxville, which I must—the weight of this place, so far from Hawai‘i, is drowning me—the green onions on my windowsill now will have to be thrown out like the last. This is what keeps me holding on to this city: the thought of my green onions curled like a baby in their recycled jam jar. The thought of them with broken shells and drying peels at the top of some trash pile, baking in the sun.

Because me and the green onions, we’ve been through so much now. They’ve been in so much—fried with eggs in the morning, mixed into the oil-splat noodles I roll out by hand. You’re the reason I get by, I tell them. You’re my only constant. I tell them I love them because without C around, they’re the only ones that can hear me. I tell them I love them because I do. Because I can.

The green onions on the sill above my sink have given me their blessing. Be free, they tell me. Go forth, somewhere far. But when I leave—which I will—I won’t toss them. I’ll plant them outside, beside lilies and violets. Without me to cut them, they will flower, white balls of blooms that invite bees to dance. In my new city, I will buy another bunch of green onions. And when I cut them, I will think of the green onions that grew on my windowsill in Knoxville. I will spread my fingers, feel their nutrients reach through my limbs. The green onions above my windowsill have become part of me through how they’ve nourished me. And though we will no longer be together, I will be grateful for that.

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COMPRESSIONS

The first time I spent an afternoon bent over, I had a panic attack. This was nineteen years before I moved to Knoxville, seventeen before I met you. I was eight years old and at the beach, looking for shells. I could not watch my best friend, Bailey, who’d run off with another girl to slip down the algaed lava of the jetty to my right and jump like ‘a‘ama crabs into the broiling water. Ass in the air, face to the sand, I scoured the waves’ residue and found only shattered whorls, topless cowries, and pink drills too small to home the hermits patrolling the shore, smaller even than the moles on my shoulder. Bailey and the other girl swam across the cove to the anchored boats. They kicked to climb. They lay flat on their backs—the sun drying their skin to salt—for at least an hour. On the shore, I gathered palmfuls of broken bones, my breath growing shorter and shorter. Soon, I could not breathe. Soon, I could not stand. And by the time they returned to shore I was in the backseat of my stepmom’s Escape, on my way to the hospital. You strained your intercostals, the doctor told me. Through the closed the door, I heard her tell my stepmom: The spasms were caused by shortness of breath. And then: Does your family have a history of anxiety disorders? Now, two decades later, I do not speak to Bailey though sometimes I like the Instagrams she posts from California—her bleached brows, the ribs that reach like claws from beneath her shirt. I have not been to that beach, or back home to Hawai‘i, for nearly three years, have not held a cowrie in hand, thumbing its smooth mound, still wet and cool from water. Instead, as my shell collection on O‘ahu gathers dust, as my name grows too small to be held in the mouths of those who loved me as a child, I gather violets. I walk the cemetery across the street from my Tennessee apartment and make plans for the flowers—syrup, garnish, vodka sodas. And after I have filled my pockets with blooms, after I have tired myself with laps through cracking headstones and over long-dead bones, I return home to you. You lead me to bed, and as you enter me, your teeth break the pebbled keloid of my earlobe. Violets crush beneath our weight, the air we breathe sharp as the oil bursting from a squeezed peel of lemon. You gasp, and pleasure rolls over me until I drown, my face pressed into our sea of pillows.

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ALL HAT, NO CATTLE

All hat, no cattle, C says as we drive. I am visiting him in Lubbock, Texas. My endometriosis has flared again and we’re on our way to Fun Noodle Bar when we pass the boy in the Ray Bans and the fake cowboy hat, his upper lip bristling with a patchy twenty-year-old’s mustache. The boy drives a pickup truck, a GMC Sierra. Back on O‘ahu, my dad drives a truck too, a smaller truck, a Tacoma he’s made into a camper, a truck I haven’t seen because of the virus. We—C and I—pass the boy in the GMC, and C rolls his window down, the window that’s not broken, we broke mine weeks ago, driving 1,100 miles to Lubbock from where I live now, in Knoxville. C waves his beer and shouts all hat, no cattle, but the boy doesn’t hear him through the tinted windows of his Sierra. I hear him, though. I remember when Dad used to drive a Ford F-150, the truck he had when I was eight, the truck he sold so my stepmom could get her Honda Pilot. Before he first went to rehab, Dad and I would take the Ford on spins through Kāhala. We’d play this game: Dad drove slow; I’d yell at people walking the sidewalk. One day I yelled at a woman and she jumped. She fell over, and that’s when we saw her from the front. That’s when we found out she was pregnant. Stop, I said. Dad drove off, even though he was a fireman, even though he used to be a paramedic. I kept asking is she okay. On the phone with the cops, my dad said I saw someone yell at a woman on Hunakai and they said we’ll check on it. Kāhala is a wealthy neighborhood. In C’s car, I forget the window’s broken and push the button but it’s the kind of broken where up is down and down is up so it doesn’t move. It grinds. C rolls his window up because we’re on the freeway and we’re driving his favorite part, the nicest view in Lubbock. He calls it rainbow road, but really it’s an offramp or maybe it’s an overpass. The sun sets in front of us, so bright that if I didn’t trust C, I might be afraid he’d drive us off the road. He pulls into the strip mall lot, and I point at the moon. It’ll be full tomorrow. The best places to view the moon in Lubbock are from parking lots, C says. He takes his beer and leaves me to grab our takeout. I think about the lot on top of Tantalus. We’d go there when Dad was really fucked up, when he didn’t want to disappoint my stepmom. On the open tailgate of his Ford, we’d sit and watch the sunset lay a sheet of gold over everything, from Diamond Head to the airport. Yesterday, C and I went to Lubbock Lake after I cried in the closet from the pain. We walked in the wind. We kicked tumbleweeds and they bounced. You’ll feel better with oxygen in your lungs, my dad always says. He started saying this after his second—or was it his third?—stint in rehab. And sometimes it’s true. Sometimes I do. But back in the car, a receipt blew out my door and I watched C chase it. It snuck below the fence and into the Little League game the kids were playing in the stadium. C came back to the car empty handed and out of breath, his beard blown up like a skirt. Almost got it, he says. Sometimes I wonder if this is all life is, chasing things we’ll never catch, losing bits of ourselves in the process. Like me, here and in love with C, who’s so much like Dad. Like Dad, going to rehab for coke, then alcohol, only to get addicted to Bikram yoga. When C and I get home, I’m so nauseous I can’t eat, can’t even sit at the table. I lie balled up on the floor and C rubs my back, tells me through a mouth of whiskey and noodles, it’ll get better, when it will only get worse.

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LINGER

The rats were in the walls. Your roommate, Harris, set traps for them. Traps with cheese, like they do in the movies. We waited. We waited so long we forgot about them. The traps, not the rats. The rats walked around your Eugene house like they owned it, taking bites of your bread, shitting on the stovetop. But the traps. The traps got lost in the walls. They caught a rat, and it rotted.

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The first house Dad bought after Mom left him was built on the side of the mountain. The backyard had a jabong tree. Dad didn’t know it when he bought the house, but it had rats. Dozens of them. They lived in the jabong tree’s roots. They’d been there for years and were huge, two feet long, grown fat on sweet citrus. I used to hear them at night, scratching in their den. I used to see them on the wall outside my window, their shadows running over my blanket.

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Harris was upstairs when the rat fell through the ceiling. You and I were eating dinner in the basement. It landed on my steak. Its red eye locked with mine: What are you doing here? I couldn’t answer. You smashed it with a broom. You broke its leg. When it screamed, I screamed too. It dragged itself across the concrete. It found a hole in the drywall as you were winding up to hit it again.

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I didn’t mind the rats. I liked that they had been on the mountain longer than we had. I thought of them as owning it. But one day I came home to a bulldozer tearing down the jabong tree. I watched as the bulldozer pushed and reversed, pushed and reversed, until the tree fell. Its roots were full of cardboard and cotton, nests of shredded leaves. A single rat darted out of the den, escaping to our neighbor’s. The rest were killed and stacked beside our fence where they lay, limp and flat, until my dad bagged them up in a black garbage bag.

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I swore the rat you hit with the broom was the same one we found rotten, but you said that one had a longer tail. Whatever. All I know is you and Harris fought those rats for months. You fought me for months. Until you gave up. Now, I’m in Knoxville, and you’re in Texas. Alone in my apartment, I think of you and the rats often. Harris says they’re still alive. I’m happy for them, happy without them, but sometimes I wonder. Sometimes I think about what would have happened if we’d had a little more time, if a rat hadn’t fallen down and ruined our dinner.

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GUT-PUNCHING

Six months later, I sit in your outdoor shower in Eugene with my arms around my knees, watching the leaves of the apple tree dance emerald in the sun’s last fingers. You stand behind me. My head rests on your thighs, the water flowing from you to me, warmed twice over by the heater and your body. It’s dirty, but it can’t be worse than our own piss, which we lay in for months, curled inside our mothers. I feel safest here, soaped in Dr. Bronner’s, the mint so sharp it burns my eyes. Suds pop in my ears and down my body, catch in the filth that sticks to the blooming lilies. Have you ever thought about how everything we think and feel right here and now has been thought and felt by someone else in this same place but in the past? I say yeah and you sigh, and I know you’re thinking of the who came girl before me. Do you ever think about how everything we’re thinking and feeling here and now is going to be thought and felt again by someone in the future? I say no, and mid-wash, your hands squeeze, spasm against my temples. I know you’re wondering who will shower here when you move. Above us, a vine crawls up the wall and twists into a canopy.

After a drunken night of fucking, I wash the dishes. The hardwood floor has bruised my knees, and the plates in the sink are crusted with the dried sauce of frozen pizza, dusted in the ashes of half-smoked, burnt-out joints. The last petals of June’s roses drop through the window’s glass. I smell the honey of the baklava you bought from the store on the corner, the sharp Parmesan you shred over spinach-swirled eggs. Fleetwood Mac is playing. I want to archive this moment, but I’m multitasking: thinking also of my best friend, Bri, who’s quarantined in DC. Two years ago, we spent St. Patrick’s Day dancing to this album. Bri belted along with Stevie on her roommate’s microphone—the same girl who’s now in Nashville making music. Back then she was in my creative writing class, where she sat next to me. I remember a story of hers about a blue light and a man who wouldn’t change. When the teacher read it, he cried. Here I am, in Eugene, trying to write something gut-punching, but mostly falling in love with the way you twist your hands and look at me after we’re done fucking, your face whispering I love you even as your mouth says That was fun. I wish I could blame you, but neither of us has learned how to say what we feel, and I know it’s easier to be in love with the memory of a person than with someone you have to leave. I put the last dish on the drying rack, and you kiss me. Up close, your eyes swirl like water just outside the reef, blue once the surf’s whitewash is good and settled. I wonder what you see when you look at me.

When you leave, I’ll try to be okay. I won’t wear deodorant for weeks, because you once told me not to, and supposedly it only takes fourteen days for your body not to stink. I’ll quit washing my hair and start smelling like you, of firewood and onions souring. I’ll ride my bike by this house and one night, when I’m sloshed with whiskey, I’ll sneak around back and pull apples from the tree. I’ll eat them in the dark, and when I go home, I’ll cook meat, scare my vegan roommate by grilling it to a char, but it’ll be better that way. Something chewed up and burnt inside me.

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One Way to Listen

I cut branches from the money tree, surely
unlucky. A jackal’s head—no matter
what body we find it on—is a sign of death.
But then the good news, announcements,
store credit. And still, a jackal’s head,
if I move carelessly, will enter my kitchen.
I can’t recognize my ghosts today. This one
has an 80s windbreaker and short curls,
and my mother asks if I’m sure she’s not
a woman in white instead of a white woman.
She’s a white woman looking at my wedding
photos, I tell my mother. But what
does she feel like, my mother presses. I
don’t know every woman who made me.

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