> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://hyperallergic.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # A Poem by Cathy Linh Che - URL: https://hyperallergic.com/a-poem-by-cathy-linh-che/ - Published: 2015-11-11T12:01:22.000Z - Updated: 2025-11-24T16:42:53.000Z - Description: Our poetry editor, Joe Pan, has selected a poem by Cathy Linh Che for his series that brings original poetry to the screens of Hyperallergic readers. - Author: Joe Pan - Tags: Poetry, Hyperallergic Poetry, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 07:13 (2014, 2015, part 3) *Our poetry editor, Joe Pan, has selected a poem by Cathy Linh Che for* [*his series*](http://hyperallergic.com/tag/hyperallergic-poetry/) *that brings original poetry to the screens of Hyperallergic readers.* \* \* \* ![Japanese Junks, ca. 1898 T. Enami (Japanese, 1859–1929) Hand–colored gelatin silver on glass 2.5 x 2.5 in. Image courtesy of the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA. http://www.pem.org/collections/12-photography](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2015/11/boats.jpg) T. Enami, “Japanese Junks” (ca. 1898), hand–colored gelatin silver on glass, 2.5 x 2.5 in. (image courtesy the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA.) ## ## Pecha Kucha — after photographs in the Peabody Essex Museum I once was a child who wore a star on my forehead. I held my mother’s hand in a new country, the chaparral dry, a landscape dusty and barren. I wore white socks and brown-strapped sandals, imagined Vietnam a country of belonging. \* Then America was a heart-shaped tattoo. My identity a checkbox. My mother saying *thiên đàng*, my father saying *sướng quá*. My country a silver headdress against a red backdrop. \* One wore a hand-me-down waistcoat, the other a vest burst open. *Smile.* *Say cheese*. But my older brother could only part his lips. My younger grinned into a future of silver coins jangling like keys in his pocket. \* My mother tucks flowers into her hair, nature objects of a funeral. This one for Freddie Gray, 10,000 more for the dead in Nepal. In the mirror she is crowned by fragility. \* My sister was born in Vietnam. She died three hours later. I don’t know her name. My mother wears a sackcloth dress in mourning. My sister is another flower my mother wears, this one pinned inside her dress, its small white mouth suckling at her breast. \* A photographer strips a woman of her top and sits her on a rock. A garland interwoven with the long metal shells of bullets hangs mid-breast, as if she is a museum object, donning war. \* In a family of men, only one has not threatened, choked, or molested me in a bathroom. My younger brother cried elephant tears when chased around the house by a terrifying machine, a vacuum cleaner, ghosts made audible. \* A fight is a kind of dance. My father advised my mother, *To marry me is to suffer.* Love called his bluff. It wasn’t a bluff, turns out. He asked, *You would leave me?* She answered emphatically, *Yes*, and for a while he quietly changed. \* To show scale, a human stands in front of a boulder. Magma fiery, then cooled, then heated again in a desert where a figure in all black blends into the shadows, into the absence of light. \* San Francisco is a porthole into human history. The structures gutted, the residents pushed out. A boomtown, a place for the wealthy, venture capitalists, programmers in gleaming condos with glass facades. \* In the bay, sailboats, a galleon, boats of leisure. My parents escaped in a smaller vessel. My father hooked fishing lines to the back. They ate rice and fish over small lit canisters of fuel. \* Barely perceptible, the double lives of couples. Parallel trains. Say, one escape attempt became two. Say, my mother, petrified, died at sea. She and her garland of mourning. Her black bonnet. My father’s ghosted uniform, his severe hands, their tenderness like switchblades. \* My mother’s sister wished me a happy birthday today. She told me, *Bring home a husband the next time* *you visit*. The one they loved I let go, inauspiciously. Today he texted me happiness. I am not the end of my maternal bloodline— but I could be, in America. \* Some days I imagine home as a structure with thatched eaves. Some days home is a craftsman somewhere on the West Coast— in the dusty hills of Highland Park, in the polished damp of Seattle. \* My mother sewed me a sail and said, *Go into the wind.* She like Penelope weaving, unraveling, biding time. I like Odysseus, bewitched by the maddening call, the wail. \* Like a corona of light, a feathered headdress signifies flight and power. What is history but that which we make ourselves, together, as birds. \* At a distance, a boomtown is just a series of structures. Interior spaces with windows through which we glimpse our worlds. The sun on the sea a light which burns onto old paper an imprint. \* My mother has removed the flowers from her hair, placed them on a station wagon for my wedding day. She has removed her veil. It is a plastic sheet protecting a rusting car on the streets of Salem, or Baltimore. It is a vehicle I may never climb into, though the remnants I will collect as pictures in my human document. \* \* \* [Cathy Linh Che](http://cathylinhche.com/?ref=hyperallergic.com) is the author of the poetry collection, [*Split*](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1938584058/?tag=hyperallergic-20&ref=hyperallergic.com)([Alice James Books, 2014](http://alicejamesbooks.org/ajb-titles/split/?ref=hyperallergic.com)), winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America.