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Quadrant Model Quotes from 2013 Lectures
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Quadrant Model Quotes from 2013 Lectures
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Cricket’s Corner
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Dust Busters
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Lucy’s Last Day
In the morning, I opened my eyes knowing
every minute would be precious and fleeting.
I ate my breakfast.
I got dressed and then I changed again.
Choosing the right colors to carry the full weight of the day.
I walked through the parking lot to get my car
which I had already filled up with gas the night before.
In the sea of grey asphalt, a large persimmon tree, full of fruit
revealed itself to me and I paused.
I dragged my feet as I walked up to the receptionist’s window.
As if my body could slow time and delay the inevitable.
We were put in a room that we had been in several times before.
Quietly and then quickly, my mother grew more vocal.
And then I understood what it meant to lament.
Time felt intangible, and though we had an appointment,
the rules didn’t apply.
The three of us are at the mall looking for an easy distraction.
The Christmas lights all around us granted this request.
We sit down at a restaurant and my father recounts his last moments of shock.
I silence him in my own desperate hope to have an untainted memory.
For now, my world falls in droplets
caught by my bowl of udon noodles.
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30.
I turned thirty and observed mortality.
I sat with the good parts of life
and what it means to love.
Sometimes love is saying less and
communicating a quiet knowing.
Love is responding to scattered flower petals.
Quietly holding them in your hands.
Whispering about the new music you heard
that transported you.
As temporary homes get rebuilt.
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self care?
Meditation teaches you to focus on breathing.
Directing the focus to the breath in your body.
Momentarily gathering yourself from the corners you’ve been scattered to.
Breathe in through your nose and hold your mind.
Note the tension running down your neck.
Exhale and bring your racing mind to a halt.
Inhale and remember you are tethered by responsibility.
One half of you wonders how to separate
personal growth from familial duty.
One half of you will daily reinforce these ties.
Beyond the invisible bifurcation lays
the landscape of a migrant’s journey:
traversing troubled country and crossing ocean
to new land, navigating new words,
new child, new family of three.
Moving forward slowly with trepidation
as mental illness diagnosis is received.
Exhale and note the tension in your shoulders.
You once were the child but now,
struggle to stand as the pillar of strength.
Inhale and survey your tethers, the restraints.
Drop your shoulders and release
the anchors that delineate your origins.
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growing
I am nine, in my own bedroom for the first time.
We moved this year.
“She’s growing and she needs her own room.”
My dad would be unemployed in the near future.
My mom would try to shield me from things.
“You’re too young to understand.”
I would go to sleep and listen through my dreams.
Two grownups argue in desperation.
Frames wrought with history and future.
-
I’m too young but I watch and listen.
I see my dad cry for the first time,
watching a recording of his late father.
My mom gives me birthday parties,
so I can have a childhood.
-
I’m too young to understand.
So when the shouting begins
I go in my room and put my headphones on.
Press play on the discman and listen
to the croons of my realities and feelings.
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steamed fish
Take ten years of a mother’s lessons
on how to properly prepare steamed fish.
Struggle to remember what she said
about choosing fish at the market.
Fail to remember how to properly clean and scale fish.
Remember that she said this past Sunday,
steam for fifteen minutes.
Half-heartedly glance at how she lightly fried
thinly cut scallions for the sauce.
Slump in your seat in preparation of steamed fish dinner.
Finish your half of the fish because
she always mentions how much it cost.
Remember that she says with a smile,
“Maybe one day you can make it for me too.”
Hope that your chances don’t run out.
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understanding
Two generations battle over the kitchen counter.
Residual sparks spray off our words.
We’re cut from the same thread.
Yet we’re still tracing our origins,
Desperately wanting the other to know us for good.
My mother wears a hat in black and white photos.
She is smiling in photos and she smiles now
as she tells me with pride.
She copied the design and made it herself.
This young teen, already an adult at fifteen,
who was forced to work farmlands with her hands.
This woman, cut from marble
who loathes the undertaking of wrapping dumplings by hand,
Possesses the fire of a young girl
who can afford dreams.
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to the females
She asks, why is my life so intense?
I ask, am I too challenging?
All the women that have left an impression
Share a common thread.
Surviving with dignity,
Sharing an existence that breathes more life.
Holding fiercely to the humanity
that is so easy to abandon.
To the women who apologize
for their existence
that is too impassioned, too fervernt,
too awake.
You’ve given me refuge.
An intimacy that does not try
to contain me.
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sundays
i have found myself writing poetry on sunday mornings
creating sanctuary and sacred space with cadence and words
to commune with the living God
in every written line i hear your voice
to remember the Divine image in others and within
this gift of poetry is prayer
to confront the wounds in my body and in the air
to ease my anxiety wondering if
i can still find you here
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touch
do you not understand, boy
that my resistance to your hands
is my defiance of what you
shape me to be
what you assume as reservation
is every ounce of me
fighting your ignorant power
-
yet what poison do i willingly take
to long for touch that diminishes my worth
because to know my place
somehow guarantees your desire
-
my body has yet to unlearn this touch
when poetry escapes me and i am caressed with lies
but i will not be your masculine prop
nor romanced into your insecurity
-
i long for touch connected to beating heart
gentle hands connected to emotional labor
an embrace that honors the femmes who have shaped
every muscle in my back
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Safety
I don’t feel safe
when I engage with the opposite sex.
Why should I let a stranger in.
Do you see the citadel I have built
surrounding and protecting
the most precious parts.
My mind and my heart,
and these are only the intangible parts.
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The tragedy was not the loss of your love.
The real tragedy was losing love for myself.
Why did I exchange my own mind for yours?
Why did I believe my spirit was a problem?
Like a weed needing to be rooted out.
Why did I feel myself return, like
I had been hiding her and diminishing her
Slowly, for four years.
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My body is heavy With the weight of men Who have pushed themselves on me My body is heavy With the weight of guilt Dropped without thought on my shoulders My body is heavy With the weight of words Saying not enough or too much My body is heavy From learning to contain "No" To release compliant silence instead My body is heavy With the heart That is outraged My body is heavy With the weight To carry others to freedom My body is heavy With the medication Of healing through empathy My body is heavy With the weight Of bold responses My body is heavy With the weight Of compassion and forgiveness My body is heavy Oh my body is heavy I am tired I am free
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Model minority myth, the story crafted for us
by voices disguised as Mother America.
An origin story rewritten and redesigned
to fold us into a false security blanket.
A story I half bought because I once rolled my eyes
when my Asian friend referred to herself as “person of color.”
Color is meant to accent and decorate.
So we became the accent paint job on the house of tiered systemic oppression.
Walls painted in shades of “personal responsibility” and “pulling bootstraps,”
finished with a gloss of “good person of color.”
A good person of color, reads, a quiet Asian.
“Look how much they are like us.”
This story fed to us to make us believe we are an elevated non-white race.
We get a free pass from punishment because we’re getting gold stars.
A story stepmother America told us, to divide her children.
America the melting pot, with liberty and justice for all.
America boasts about this end product as if it was her idea.
Generous America opens her arms to all the children of the world.
Forgetting that every colored thread used to create the fabric of this country,
Broke their backs and relinquished their names.
Changed their hair and their clothes
to look more like stepmother’s children.
Model minority mutiny.
Who are you to use the good in us to shame the vulnerable.
Who are you to teach us to spit on our brothers and sisters.
The first black president is not your achievement to claim.
Model minority will not be your house POC who sits quietly
and obediently stays out of the way.
We collectively cannot breathe when our civil liberties
depend on the oppression of others.
I cannot keep praying to a white Jesus when even in God’s house,
Jesus gets rewritten by someone else speaking for Him.
Model minority myth, a story rewritten to make us forget
we were once the Yellow Peril.
Buck toothed, slanty eyes, sexless yet sex crazed primitive animals.
Model minority myth, a story told to whitewash human struggle.
So let me dispel the myth.
When colored people came into this world,
we were all once human.
And that is the only level playing field.
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Emerging from beneath a mountain that kept you under.
You are incomplete without a mate.
Time will be unkind to your physiology.
You will lose sacred opportunity every month.
It was a season of love.
I am not incomplete because I am a whole person
wonderfully and fearfully made.
I am not the weaker vessel because I allow
rain to fall from my eyes.
I am a duality of confidence and vulnerability.
I am corrugated steel on a house
that withstands salt, wind, and water.
I am the cotton of my mother’s sleeve
as she caressed my forehead and kissed me goodnight.
I am the brilliance of female computers who determined
the life and death of man in space.
I am the look of mischief and baby hairs stuck to my forehead
as my dad ran with me on his shoulders.
I am the quiet resilience of trees breaking through concrete.
I am broken pottery whose pieces were put back together.
Cracked lines filled in with gold.
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It was a season of discovery.
Stuck in the orbit, unable to escape gravitational pull
of a predetermined life. A way of being.
I was five when my mother taught me
the parts of my body I needed to protect.
At the same age, I wore sticker earrings on my unpierced ears.
I was told to wear my hair up for school
because vanity was a distraction.
In sixth grade, girls came back to school with chunky heels.
I noticed I was still wearing flat shoes.
I learned why my mother stressed unseen qualities
like thoughtfulness, work ethic, honesty, morality.
Because I would go to school one day
with a visible skin rash and kids would tell me what I looked like.
I would beg my mom to come pick me up from school
because my vanity had gotten to me.
I trained myself to not look in mirrors when I left the house
because vain girls are shallow. Vanity is not a virtue.
Virtue, we would learn, is a woman’s most valuable asset.
A woman’s virtue, the factory seal unopened plastic
separating the new and the used.
Get your education. Go to college
and find a husband while you’re there.
When you graduate you’ll be asked,
Who are you dating? When, are you dating?
out of concern you’ll be an unwed loser. Fresh flowers
sitting at the store for too long.
It was a season of transformation.
I began as a city that was burned to the ground.
The death of another relationship crushed my soul.
Shame made me less human. Pain put me in a deep sleep.
A chain reaction of an object escaping gravitational pull.
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home
What is a home?
Is it four walls that hold you in?
Is it more than a tent or a makeshift shack
under the overpass or behind an abandoned lot?
Mom says you can’t be homeless if you have a job.
What if you can’t afford your rent,
so you sleep in your car, even with a job.
What if you send paychecks to your family
because family is everything. They’re struggling.
What is a home?
Is it four walls that hold in your hopes?
What if you leave a home full of memories
and a land of opportunities taken from you.
Muster the courage to pack your belongings and prized possessions.
Make peace with the unsettling amount of time and space
between you and your first home.
Daughters and sons who leave familiar places for new life across the ocean.
What is a home?
Is it four walls where you hang the contents of your life on makeshift clotheslines
in the space between three-tier bunk beds?
Four walls created for aliens of small stature.
Migrants from the east who wore all their best clothes
Put on their best selves to prove themselves
Acceptable in their new home.
What is a home?
Is it four walls that change every few years?
Mother telling daughter, we will be friendly with the landlord.
We will keep a good relationship.
We will share our food and good intentions.
We will be good tenants.
We will put on our best selves.
We will give thanks for precarious new homes.
Remembering always
Not to overstay our welcome.
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why this waste?
A thick layer of humidity / allows me to only breathe / A particular way of being
I breathe borders and interpretations / of Whiteness that pushes the other / to invisibility, to fear, to inhumanity
Except that the other is inescapable / The other side is in me
I breathe Canton lands, arepas / and dreams of freedom
I breathe quiet courage / Feminine authority / Asian resistance / Generational future
But is this dangerous both / the beautiful middle / Actually living?
Below the bridge is a running river / Past the gated wall the sea rushes through / Between wired fences green pushes upward for life
But is this dangerous both / the beautiful middle / A wasteland to mourn?
The fight to breathe / through thick layers of humidity / Resides in me
No, I am not a wasteland / this dangerous both / the beautiful middle / Exists.
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