Red Blues

By K.A. Jagai

I

My father was not the oldest,
but he was the brightest
boy and so he was sent first

to America. Despite how far
he crawls from Guyana
he will never scrape the wet

earth roads from his feet,
never scrub his pink tongue
of coolie colloquialism.

When I pass down stories
of a back home I have never seen,
my tongue slips quickly

into Caribbean. My father,
terrified of himself, still says
close the lights and tirty tird.

He is a staunch republican.
He once refused to hire a Trini
temp because she had heard

it hiding behind sharp white
enamel, too. How dare she, he asked
my mother. How dare she?

II

My family came here as
paper sons and through air-
ports requiring cash

in brown paper bags
my mother borrowed to save
a thankless man's brothers.

My mother's hands, a long
fingered daughter of those who fled
burning torches of red

revolution. She did not ask
for much. A loving man. A man
who would give up everything

as her father, and his father before
him, all the way up the chain—
a long line of noble Chinese men.

My mother was born in China-
town. New York City is all
the home she knows. They call

her zuk-sing, empty shell,
Chinese on the outside and
hollow within. She was

gentrified out of Brooklyn last
year—rising rents and Rag
and Bone encroaching, slowly,

slowly, she watches as the stores
filled with pastries and duck
hanging neck-wrung in clouded

windows falls away, replaced
by sleek NYU façades and
rowdy bars. She takes my white

midwestern girlfriend by the hand
and points: Look, there. Do
you see? It's all gone.

III

Here is the beautiful
thing about being a
child bridging worlds

you don't know: the women
are strong in all the same ways,
and yet carry their wrinkles

like maps. Here is where I
fought a brawling student
off with words. He had a cutlass.

I was pregnant, the size
of a planet. I contained the
world and more within me,

and I won. By God, I won.
Here is where I fought a man
who wanted to take from me

what was not his to take. I
was fifteen. Here is the scar
I saw in a young boy's side

left from a knife brawl.
New York was different then.
It wasn't safe for us.

IV

But is it safe for us, now,
I want to ask them.
My mother's missing finger-

tip tells no tales. She is voting
for Hillary. She is sick of white
men ruining everything all

of the time. She wants
a better life for herself.
She does not think of dying brown

children in far-off lands. She is too
fearful for her own son, of his being
shot to care about the abstract.

What do you have against
allies? a white girl asks
in an online forum.

Nothing, I do not say to her.
I have nothing against
your empathy at all.