I am eating again at Garlic and Chives, 
my favorite Vietnamese restaurant, 
the table laden with plates of salmon belly 
spring rolls, fish noodle soup, fried 
soft tofu, turning to see what other 
people have ordered. The restaurant 
is filled with Vietnamese families, 
laughing, talking, gesturing at this 
or that, calling over the waiters, 
but I can’t listen in. I don’t speak 
the language, and besides, it’s way 
too loud. So I study their faces, 
the plates they pass, noticing how 
they track my eyes, and I imagine 
their annoyance at my tacit prying, 
as though I wanted to invade 
this private sanctuary. I remember 
the war between our countries, 
and how, as so often, it was all 
our fault. I know it was long ago, 
and the young people around me 
were probably born here, decades 
after that war. Yet we might as well 
be separated by a pane of glass,
 as my cat is from the mockingbird 
in the pepper tree, the woodpecker 
in the eucalyptus. I want to forget 
my sorrow, hold out the plate of spring 
rolls, my favorite dish, as an offering, 
but constrained by conventions and 
my own dark imaginings, I don’t.

When my son was small, I held him 
in one arm, singing him to sleep: 
I sang as much to me as him,
sleep shattered by the schedule
of constant wakefulness. Hushabye,
I’d warble. Don’t you cry! Go to sleep, 
you little baby. The music lulled him,
but not me. The world’s weight 
wore me down. After all, what 
was I giving him? A world of pain 
and violence, and yet of beauty too, 
and so I soothed myself and him 
as well, with hope, crooning: 
When you wake, you shall 
have all the pretty little horses.
 
Now he’s grown. The temperature’s 
rising steadily, extinctions 
proliferate. A pandemic rages.
Hope wanes like an iceberg 
in the swelling sea. I’ve seen 
the carcasses of whales and seabirds, 
gullets full of bottle caps and 
shredded plastic bags, but tomorrow, 
I’ll walk into the hills and find those horses 
switching their tails under the live oaks.