Pedagogy

When I got a D in College & Career class,

I figured it was probably over for me,

at least in terms of college and career,

which felt, at the time, like most of what

would be my life. It’s weird now,

being gainfully employed and alive.

Early spring in Brooklyn, I walked

into fourth period ELA to find

all my 7th graders standing on desks,

singing Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5”.

A year earlier, those kids went to school

through their laptops. That was life.

I’m telling you, they really knew all the words

by heart. So I sat down and listened

to them sing the whole song.

When My Father Retires

He’ll move back to China. He tells me this

laying on the wooden floor of my dorm room

the night before my graduation. When my sisters leave for college,

he’ll finally go back home. I should have pulled him

from the floor, offered him my bed. Instead,

I watched him turn on his side, use his backpack as a pillow.

He hasn’t been back to China in forty years.

A country further from him than the beginning

of my life. Land I have only imagined.

Other days, he says he’ll return to O‘ahu,

that he’ll stay in Chicago, that he doesn’t know where

he will go. I understand. He is looking for home like it’s a place.

In the morning, I searched for him when I walked across the stage

clutching a roll of paper with nothing on it.