Spoken word

Lao lao's ghost still sings to the mango tree

they paved into a Dollar General parking lot.

She taught me to read the sky's cursive—

how cirrus clouds curl like the language i forgot to speak,

how a monsoon's throat holds the grief

of a thousand unnamed islands.

"bao be" she'd say,

"when the ocean starts coughing up skeletons,

don't pray—organize."

But mama's spine is collapsing into high-rises,

condos blooming like tumors where the wetlands wept.

Last spring, the sea gnawed through our front door,

left salt scars on the photo albums,

yei yei's face dissolving into a blot.

FEMA said "rebuild," but the loans came shackled

to interest rates heavier than caskets.

Now we rent a studio where the roaches

write eviction notices on the walls.

In Houston, a boy floats face-down in a school gym,

his Spiderman backpack still humming

"It's a small world after all."

His mother claws at a National Guard Hummer"

her screams soldered into silence

a CNN ticker:

"Climate refugees swarm Louisiana coast—

when will the president act?"

Act?

The president's teeth are made of pipeline.

They'll mine our tears for lithium

before they admit the apocalypse

wasn't a prophecy—

just a spreadsheet.

At the border, a child tugs my sleeve,

her eyes two burned-out galaxies:

"为什么你看起来这么难过？" ("why do you look so sad?")

I want to tell her the truth—

that her mother's bones are now a dam in Arizona,

her father's laugh, a BP oil spill.

Instead, I empty my canteen into her palms,

watch her drink the future like blasphemy.

They call us "displaced."

As if we're luggage.

As if our grief isn't GPS-tagged,

our trauma tax-deductible.

ICE drones buzz overhead,

"This land is your land!"

a chorus that stinks of golf course and gasoline.

My cousin used to say hurricanes

are just the earth's way of vomiting

the poison we fed her.

He disappeared last August,

his fishing boat a coffin

for the last bluefin tuna.

The cops said "accident,"

but we know Exxon wrote the autopsy.

Tonight, I duct-tape my windows,

trace my daughter's face in the dark.

She asks why her asthma pump

sounds like a grenade pin dropping.

I don't say it's because the air's been mortgaged

to a coal baron's yacht fund.

Instead, I hum lao lao's mango tree song,

teach her to spell "revolution"

with a crayon on the moldy drywall.

"mama, will we always be drowning?"

"No, bao be. We're the ark.

And the storm?

It's just the world going into labor."

You want to know how to skin a hurricane?

First, you gotta stop flinching

when they call your pain "natural disaster."

Then, you arm your breath

with every name the ocean stole.

Finally—you rise.

Not as flood.

Not as corpse.

But as tide.