Bestiary

My mother always says that the story you believe depends on the body you're in. What you believe will depend on the color of your hair, your word for god, how many times you've been born, your zip code, whether you have health insurance, what your first language is, and how many snakes you have known personally.

You think burial is about finalizing what’s died. But burial is beginning: To grow anything, you must first dig a grave for its seed. Be ready to name what’s born.

My mother said that keeping a clean home was a sign of wealth and keeping a husband was a sign of stupidity.

I related to the guillotine the most: I, too, was a direct descendant of gravity, born from women who belonged inside their countries the way blades belonged inside a body.

Once, I asked her what happened to a body when it died. She said it became a story, and death was just another translation of it.

The only man you should marry is the moon, she said, so you can divorce it every morning.

A forest is a kind of growth. A jungle is hunger, a desire to dethrone light. Its only lineage is rain. Forests grow upward, fingers to the sun. Jungles grow sideways, outward, downward, whatever direction is the opposite of death.

She laughed again, but this laughter sounded like a recording of the last, too repetitive to be real.

Don't tell me how it ends yet. Tell me that it doesn't.

This story was meant to show you: the ones we should save are already dead. Before he was your agong, he was my ba. Before he was my ba, he was a soldier. When you're a soldier, nothing comes before or after. Don't think I forgive him. Forgiveness is surgery, and I don't have the hand or the eye.

Dear final daughter, You married a man the opposite of your father but I need to say all men are synonyms none the word you’re looking for

I see the way you wear your hands without worry, but someday they’ll bury something. Someday this story will open like a switchblade. Your hands will plot their own holes, and when they do, I won’t come and rescue you.

The only man you should marry is the moon, [...], so you can divorce it every morning.

All losses come in threes

They always say: cold feet in bed means a man will leave you I have had cold feet my whole life & still no luck

Except Ma doesn't measure her life in years but in languages: Tayal and Yilan Creole in the indigo fields were she was born blue-assed and fish-eyed, Japanese during the war, Mandarin in her Nationalist-eaten city. Each language was worn outside her body, clasped around her throat like a collar.

Once an animal gets mean, Ama liked to say, there's no way to make it good again, You kill what can't be saved. All of her murders began as mercies

While she slept that night, I stole something from her suitcase, which was just the same twined-up shepi bag she'd brought from the island. I took the book. I told myself it wasn't stealing if the thing had already been stolen once. Two acts of thievery canceled out, became something more like salvaging. I still have it, that book. You should read it to me sometime, skipping all the words you think I don' know. I won' t know them, but I'll pretend to, shame you for thinking me stupid, and then you'll be so sorry you'll read the whole book to me all over again, redacting nothing.

In wartime, land is measured by the bones it can bury. A house is worth only the bomb that banishes it. Gold can be spent in any country, any year, any afterlife. The sun shits it out every morning. Even Ma misreads the slogans on the back of American coins: IN GOLD WE TRUST. That's why she thinks we're compatible with this country. She still believes we can buy its trust.

If we stayed here,’ she said, ‘and the water kept outgrowing us, what do you think would happen?’ I told her we’d drown, but Ben said I was wrong. We’d grow gills, she said.

Do you remember that story I told you? my mother said. I asked her which one, and she told me about the women who hanged themselves with their own hair when the mountains were mowed over. Once, we lived inside the ground. The sun swung like a bucket of our blood. When I asked why they hanged themselves, she said the only way to own your body is to die inside it. I said that wasn't true anymore. She stood up and tugged her own ear, checking to see if we were dream-speaking. Steaming her hands over the bowl of water, she said, You're not listening. The steam opened her fists like flowers. The story about women, she said, was a story about choice. How we had one. How we chose to be dead in our own bodies than alive without our language. I chose you, my mother said...

We believe in reincarnation, so you can't deport us

in this country you always spoke for me when the cashiers told me how much was owed you counted the money over I want to know hoe much you will forgive me for

You married a man the opposite of your father but I need to say al men are synonyms none the word youj're looking for

What feeds on your body without permission is a parasite children are no exception. The only cure is to survive what lives off you

I was supposed to be home and not on the sidewalk where our shadows touched shoulder-bones. Around her neck, the pendant swung loose and she tucked it back inside her shirt. While she walked, I thought about stealing it, jerking the pendant off its string and sucking it till my mouth silvered. I wanted to own something the same temperature as her skin, a talisman of her touch.

One of her eyes was single-creased and the other double-creased, what my mother called dragon-phoenix eyes: One eye saw everything farther away than it was, and the other saw everything close-up. I was both far across the field and close enough to be baked by her breath. I wanted to be what she saw of me: many-bodied, standing everywhere like a field, so that at every moment, every step, she arrived at me.

I pretended I was a tree and her hands in my hair were perching birds. I tried to be a place she could stay.