grandma only died when we’d all held hands

a poem that's five pages long

there’s a walking cotton ball in my apartment,
ears pricked like it’s some sort of canary sniff
every time the dishwasher starts its samsonite song,
this little bunny, a prey animal i’ve saved
from the cold hard craigslist post that simply said,
“bunny for sale. i don’t want it anymore.”
when i picked her up, she had a name tattooed
on the inside of her ear, for the days her breeder
had hoped she would be a show bunny under
lights she feared and strangers with their reaching hands,
magnolia, magnolia, magnolia—the only flower that blooms
for one day only. a whole season can go by and you can
miss the single day it sprouts its pillow-white fractals
across the thick bi-colored leaves. emak loved the magnolia
tree in the yard. emak loved to text me a photo every winter
when the tree would bloom. “i’m a day late,” she’d sometimes say,
the evidence a few shriveled petals browning off the stem.
she won’t pick them off, but will send me photos every day,
as the petals fall and the magnolia falls back into itself,
until the white turns brown turns leaf turns barren tree.
emak loved maggie too. she understood a prey animal
more than most. she liked to look from afar, hands
folded tightly behind her back. she was always a pacifist.
engkong would yell and she’d say okay. mom would yell
and she’d say again tomorrow. dad would yell and
she’d wonder why he hadn’t inherited her patience,
how sometimes nature stumped nurture and the adoption
papers couldn’t delegate temperament. but papers
could do a lot. papers that say i’m your mother
were pearls she stuffed into suitcases so that she could
get the right visa for her son, when his birth parents
said i can get him to america first. papers that say
asylum meant that their babies could be safe.
papers that say chinese indonesians are born a problem
are plastered into warhawk documents. commie
commie commie tattooed on our faces because
we were the scariest voting block. papers that say
the us-backed dictator has won the election. papers
declassified 50 years later calling us everything
the sun darkens. street signs where the police
will stop your car and strip search you because
your car is the right caste. papers that say a blank
seat on singapore airlines meant that when the us
turned jakarta into its own civil war, mom and dad
waited for three days and drove with the pedal
pressed flat against the car floor i’m just a baby in a belly,
a printed ultrasound screening they kept in one of the
pockets they stuffed full of everything they needed
to hide in singapore until their visas were approved.
mom never let me use the word refugee. but we were.
emak took us in like we were show bunnies who’d
fallen in hay, went half blind, and couldn’t be paraded
around for display anymore. finally, her son in the us.
finally, her granddaughter born in the city just south
of the bay. finally, the papers meant that there was
blood and flesh beneath ink that she had imagined
tattooed onto a stomach never pregnant, but always
hungry, filled with sawdust-mixed oatmeal during the last
world war. when she’d run from the bombs, the dutch,
the murder plot against her family. in her later years,
she’d often say she was the last one left. her sisters dead.
her parents dead. her husband dead. she talked to a portrait
of him in the bathroom, and we’d hold hands and cry together,
the last two to mourn him in a family that never forgot
his rage. the house was always screaming, creaky door hinges
gone un-oiled, the loud blast of televangelism announcing
the final horns of rapture upon us, again and again, a fear
and a discipline running through our blood like we were all
waiting for the bomb to drop, another one, another. it’s hard
to unlearn fear when the womb that held you was in passport
limbo. mom yells at me for saying good morning to a cyclist,
and do i know him, and why would i say hello. and every year,
the magnolia tree in the backyard blooms. and every year, grandma
texts me a picture. the month after i get maggie, she sends me a photo
of a squirrel in a magazine. “rabbit.” she has captioned it.
the photo again. rabbit emoji rabbit emoji rabbit emoji.
she has never unlearned fear, but she has never unlearned kindness either.
my parents wield arguments like their everyday underwear, trading
in new colors so they’re unseen in public. utilitarian. in private,
full glory. my emak watches as they yell themselves purple, sidles
up to my boyfriend, and holds his hand silently. when they’re finished,
and i slam the car door on my way out the driveway, she squeezes her hand
and mouths the words “thank you.” she stands by the garage, waving
until we’re out of sight. i still can picture her that way. just waiting, waving,
squinting her eyes in the way i learned a smile can be warm. she died in february.
on her last day, she went to church and counted the offerings. we ate at her
favorite restaurant in oakland, and she ate more than she had in six months.
she remembered which dishes grandpa would order. it was the year of the snake,
and she came to my apartment one final time, drinking chrysanthemum tea
from my new porcelain. it was the first time in a year that my parents and i didn’t
argue, and she left a part of herself sitting there, in the corner of my couch,
shedding a skin right there as if to say this marks a peacekeeping, this is where i
can say goodbye. i learned about the riots after she died. my family sat around
the dining table, her body in the other room while we waited for the morgue
to pick her up. my sister had heard the story before, when she had spent
her inheritance on her side of a yelling match and my father told her to be
kinder to my mom. we’re all just molotov cocktails waiting to be lit and thrown
into the next room, setting our tempers ablaze. the dry air will do that to you.
the sacramento heat. the way none of us were supposed to be here and are.
the way we’re walking on land that we had dreamed of for years hoping
one regime would outlast another. when trump was elected, i remembered
my grandmother’s birthday. her friend drove two hours to have lunch with her.
held her hand the entire way across the parking lot. they’d both come here
for the same reason. to run away. and they were still here, palms interlaced
in a random california suburb, knowing that if one of them fell, we’d bend
hips to catch each other. my dad didn’t get citizenship until another republican
was in office because he didn’t give a shit about voting. he gave a shit about us.
a permanent green card was enough to go to work, leave early to help his kids
with homework, get enough money to buy groceries for grandma to cook like
it was her restaurant all over again, go to bed, wake up in the morning, go to work,
leave early, get dinner, go to bed, wake up, go to work, leave early, get dinner, go to
bed, go to bed, go to bed, and sleep without worrying that he’d have to pack his
bags again in the middle of the night and escape another genocide. 
my mom textedme the other night and asked what i was doing. 
i said i was watching tv. she said her too.
she said i’m learning about this crazy trump bombing in iran. 
i say it’s iraq all over again.
she says stay safe, the same way she said who was there when i read at the first
gathering of chinese-indonesian writers since the 90’s. she says stay safe, and i know 
i will. i know i will because i’m busy holding hands 
with my fucked up friends who send money
to fucked up mutual aid groups and go to fucked up actions 
and fuck up every mic they read into. the speakers shatter 
because we’re loud and just the wrong pitch. it’s like
the electricity lines know we’re sending e-sims to palestine. it’s like 
the regime is listening
and we’ve never fucking cared. we’re too busy holding hands. i quit my stupid job
and work at a shelter for unhoused families now. i’m not wasting a second of my day. 
i’m writing the story of how i breathed kindness 
back into my body. i’m buying bouquets
for my neighbors. i’m carrying know your rights cards in my pockets. i’m going to bed
wondering when the next bomb will drop. i’m waking up. i’m going to work, leaving
late, cooking dinner, going to bed wondering, waking up, going to work, 
writing, cooking dinner, calling my friends, going to bed, going to bed, 
going to bed, and thanking god for every time i wake up and get to be kind. 
i feed maggie every morning.
i think of how she’s named after a flower, burned right into her ear. and i think
of how my ears burn too, pressed to the concrete to count the footfalls
across oceans, listening how best we can talk back across tin cans and string.