The question plows a dint on my chest
The way the sentence ends with a doubt
wrenches my heart into a clustered shame
I must look really Asian today
For him to exercise such freedom
To claim an identity for me
To colonize my mouth with his skin
He don’t know the words I carry
“Wrong use of verb”
Or how my father sang the alphabet into my ear
“Do you mean years or ear?”
I loosely emphasize the you
I don’t understand what YOU are asking me.
Because your thin lips stutter
Your headphones cover your conscious
(I should have said)
No.
They say curse word is always the first thing
One picks up when learning a new language
Here is fuck off
I will accept your apology
When you accept my legitimacy
For I make these sounds
Out of my father’s hands
I wonder if my daughter hears my fever
Sometimes she corrects my grammar
With a sharp eraser,
Teetering the slits on my tongue.
Kaya Arnoux is a poet, visual arts teacher, and language educator born & raised in Taiwan. After making peace with her identity as an immigrant, she began to focus her writing on the inquiry of language as a colonizing medium and how reclaiming the English language as her own gives affirmation to her existence as a migrant. Her poetry investigates the meaning of tradition, family, identity, and what it means to be Asian in a racialized country. Her poetry has been published in The Rumpus, The Seventh Wave, and others. She resides in Los Angeles with her husband and their biracial daughter. You may follow her on twitter @ArnouxKaya and instagram @kayatalkingsense