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Roots & Rules

Little Girl, Listen

Little girl, listen—

I know the black-and-blue beneath your sleeve,
the red crescent pressed where skin learned to grieve,
the knees made to carry what was never their blame,
the numbers that blurred whenever they called your name.

I know the wall you studied for hours,
as though somewhere beneath plaster and paint
there had to be a window they forgot to build,
some narrow opening where the air remained.

So when I tell you that you were never bad,
believe the woman who remembers what you had—
a childhood framed with shouting in the rafters,
shame worked deep into the grain,
where every crack in someone else’s foundation
was somehow given your name.

But little girl,

you were never the damage.

You were the child living inside it,
learning which floorboards complained beneath a foot,
which doors should never be opened,
how small a body could make itself
when nowhere in the house felt safe.

And one day, you will leave.

Old houses have a way of following people—
a splinter beneath the skin,
a hinge still crying in the wind.

There will even be men who resemble those rooms:
different curtains, fresh paint,
another name above the door,
yet something in the air will feel terribly known,
and you may mistake familiar for home.

Until you learn
that love should not require
reading weather from another person’s face,
measuring every word,
memorizing every escape.

Then slowly, little girl,
you will rebuild—

beam by beam with better wood,
window by window until morning can enter
without asking permission first.

And one day,
someone small will come running through them—

your daughter.

She will leave laughter loose in the hallway,
her shoes placed neatly beside the door,
because you will teach her to care for what shelters her
without teaching her to fear the shelter.

You will show her the beams beneath every rule,
why one wall bears weight
and another was only placed there
because someone older said it should be.

You will teach her to ask why
until the question becomes a window,
until she can look through it herself
and choose which door to take.

You will not teach her
that being older makes someone right.

You will teach her
how to see for herself.

And somewhere beneath every room that you mend,
another little girl will begin again—
the one who learned early to live on thin air,
who stayed in that house
long after everyone left her there.

You will raise them together:

one child beside you,
growing forward,

one child inside you,
finally growing free.

Little girl,

that second child will be me.

Because I will become the mother we needed—
the hands that guide without leaving bruises,
the voice that explains instead of commands,
the love that does not demand silence
before it gives affection.

I will become the roof when the weather turns wild,
the door that opens instead of locks,
the woman who kneels to the height of a child
and tells her what someone should have told you:

You are beautiful.

You are worthy.

You were never the stain,
never the reason the windows shook,
never the thunder,
never the rain.

So come out of that house, little girl.

Leave the shame where it fell.

There is another home waiting,
where questions are allowed through every doorway,
where a child can understand the rules she is given
instead of fearing the person who gave them.

I know because I built it—

for the girl laughing down the hall,
for the woman rebuilding these walls,
and for the child still standing
where the old house stood,

waiting for someone to come back for her.

Little girl, listen—

I came back.

I built this home

for her,

for me,

for you.

The Racket

At four, my father put a racket in my hand,
his favorite sport, though never mine to choose;
he had no son, so eldest learned to stand,
and learned each stroke he wanted me to use.

We worked my double backhand day by day,
changed grips, two hands, drilled every stroke his way;
until the turn and racket waiting low
became a thing my body seemed to know.

By middle school, I found myself alone,
my parents both were meant to be at work;
then from upstairs I heard the front door groan,
the lock, the blows, each hard repeated jerk.

A man called out my name. I strained to hear,
but broken syllables were all I knew;
each blow against the doorway sharpened fear,
and every crash convinced me he’d break through.

At last I took the racket from its place,
came down the stairs prepared to meet his face;
I turned the lock and opened up the door—
no one. Just silence where he’d slammed before.

I turned to climb the staircase by the door,
when blinds like white curtains rattled at the back;
I spun and ran straight hard across the floor,
toward the sliding door, prepared to attack.

I never thought, Change grip. Turn left. Prepare.
My hands were set before I was aware.
My shoulders pivoted, the racket low—
my body knew exactly where to go.

The white blinds parted. My father stepped in view.
I knew his face before the racket flew.
I stopped. No swing, no follow-through, no blow—
the racket stayed exactly there, down low.

Back in my room, exhausted from the strain,
I played those few wild seconds through again;
and only then I understood, alone:
my body knew that backhand on its own.

For years, my father built it stroke by stroke,
with every grip and shoulder turned with care;
I never knew how deeply practice spoke—

the backhand he had built was waiting there.

A Little Understanding

A little understanding, Mother,
might have made your warnings easier to bear.
You wore your cape as though you’d never faltered;
I never knew the woman hidden there.

You yelled when I climbed onto the roof
to hear the morning Mass from streets below;
yet you led your sisters there in youth
to watch a midnight party glow.

You scolded me for every pencil spared,
each toy I placed in someone else’s hand;
yet paid your sister’s children’s college fare
while teaching yours to live with less than planned.

I pulled my sisters’ hair, I pinched, I shoved;
I hurt them, though I loved them all the same.
Yet if our noise disturbed you on the phone,
you’d hurl two heavy metal cats our way.

No love until my schooling’s done, you’d say;
yet helped your older sister’s lover in at night—
through the window, before your father’s rounds—
then hid him in the rice bin, out of sight.

You feared the poems where I named desire;
our co-worker knew the raunchiest jokes you’d tell.
You tried to tame in me that same old fire
you carried, though you hid it far too well.

I know—you meant to spare me what had scarred you,
to steer me from mistakes you’d made before;
yet while you warned me what I must not do,
you missed the wound that mattered so much more.

You taught me how a woman stays through pain,
how love can ask her dignity to bend.
I needed you to teach me, just as plain,
that love without respect deserves an end.

Then cancer caught the cape you wore so well;
the verdict made your guarded courage yield.
You used its hem to wipe the tears that fell—
the woman underneath, at last, unveiled.

When I touched your hand, already cold,
I knew your shell no longer carried you.
The cape became a blanket, fold on fold;
each hidden part at last came into view.

Too late, I understood what death made clear:
the woman underneath was much like me.

I only wish I’d known her
while you were here.

The Throne

I came home at eighteen, two hours by train,
and found you enthroned before the screen—
armchair pulled close, your racket a scepter,
a medicine ball bowed beneath your feet.

From where I stood between the rooms,
I could see you both at once:
you to my left, my mother to my right—
she on her knees, scrubbing kitchen tile,
you seated still while the match played on.

She had worked eight hours, then chemotherapy,
came home, cooked dinner, and knelt to clean;
cracked fingers taped where the skin would split and peel,
while supper simmered and tennis filled the screen.

Then she looked up at me from the floor.

I looked left, then right—
at the man who could have risen,
and the woman already on her knees,
and knew who paid for your ease.

Permit Forever Denied

Papa, you were the blueprint I never asked for,
the first flawed plan beneath my floor.
I learned your walls before I knew
a home could hold without hurting too.

You were supposed to show me structure,
how steady hands could raise a roof.
But every room you built with anger
taught me fear could pass for truth.

You did not need your fists each morning.
Your words could splinter beams the same.
You made the hallways hold their breath,
then gave our trembling another name.

Outside, you wore the polished porch,
the helpful husband, warm with grace.
But once the windows closed behind you,
love limped quietly through that place.

You built back doors for other women,
then called the house a holy thing.
You left your vows in hidden rooms,
then wondered why the walls would ring.

You poured the bottle on the beams,
then blamed us for the flame.
But even when the drink was gone,
the cold remained the same.

You burned the home with us inside,
then cried about the smoke.
You stood in ash and played the victim
while we were left to choke.

And when I loved, I chose the cracks,
the leaning walls, the doors that slammed.
I called it shelter when it shook
because your hands had drawn the plans.

You failed me as a father first,
before those men came walking through.
They were not strangers at my door.
They were rooms I recognized from you.

Then every year near Father’s Day,
or holidays dressed soft with light,
you filed your plans for reconstruction,
asking me to make it right.

You asked to rebuild what you burned,
to raise new rooms on ruined ground.
I almost signed.
I almost let you build again.

But you came only for what your sister left,
for papers, payment, family due.
You crossed the miles for inheritance,
but not the street to see us too.

My daughter waited by the door,
believing what you said was true.
And when your damage reached her too,
the old design came into view—

I became the city.
I read the plans.
I found each fault you tried to hide.
No further reconstruction.

Permit forever denied.

Ephesians 6:2–4

We learned the second verse by heart:
Honor your father and your mother.
We learned obedience from the start,
how questioning could set apart
the faithful child from every other.

We heard it quoted when we strayed,
when voices rose, when children cried.
Respect was something we displayed;
obedience, the debt we paid—
while hurt was swallowed down inside.

But Scripture did not end at two.
Verse four spoke to the parents too:
do not provoke the ones you raise,
do not let anger fill their days—
God placed a duty there for you.

Yet somehow verse four lost its place.
The words for children filled the air.
We learned obedience, duty, grace,
but rarely heard, with equal weight,
the burden parents also bear.

So honor sometimes came to mean
endure the wound and still obey;
keep family pain where none could see,
keep anger buried quietly,
and never name what happened that day.

But honor cannot mean erase.
Respect cannot require a bruise.
No parent gains a sacred place
by quoting God to save their face
while children bear what they did not choose.

A verse should never be a chain
pulled tight around a smaller voice.
Faith does not sanctify the pain,
then ask the wounded to remain
as though obedience were a choice.

Perhaps the holiest thing we do
is read the passage to the end:
not only what the child must prove,
but what the parent owes in Love—
to guide, protect, and to defend.

Read all of it.
Let both be heard.
Let neither side escape the Word.

Honor is not a one-way door.
The child is called in verse two.
The parent answers in verse four.

Mixed Messages

I learned love in mixed messages,
in tenderness tangled with terror,
in hands that could leave me hurting
then hold what I made like treasure.

The same person who taught me to shrink
was the first to give my voice room,
to gather my poems page by page
and treat every line like something meant to bloom.

She framed the photographs I captured,
placed blank canvases in my hands,
bought the brushes, paints, permission
to become what neither of us yet planned.

And that is where hatred falters.

Anger wants an easy enemy,
a clean conviction, a simple scar,
but memory keeps interrupting
with evidence of who you also are.

How do you hate someone entirely
when she was the first to believe?
How do you curse the hands that hurt you
when those same hands taught you to create?

How do you make a monster
of someone who once could have gone,
yet surrendered her own escape
so three daughters still had a mom?

There are wounds that remain wounds.
There are wrongs I will never rename.
Love does not make cruelty gentle
or absolve what caused the pain.

But goodness does not disappear
because it grew beside the grief.
Two truths can live inside one memory
without asking either one to leave.

That is the cruelty of contradiction:
the one who taught your body fear
can be the first to see the artist
before you knew that she was there.

The one who gave you words to write about
can preserve the words you wrote.
The one who made you doubt your worth
can be the first to name it, too.

So hatred never settles cleanly.

I have tried.

I have held hurt against tenderness,
memory against memory, night against light,
trying to choose which version mattered,
trying to decide which one was right.

But the story will not separate.

A poem saved.
A photograph framed.
A canvas waiting.
A sacrifice made.

Some people are both the reason
you learned to hide
and the reason
you learned to write.

Maybe that is the mixed message
even time cannot erase:

you can leave scars
and still leave gifts.

You can fail someone
and still believe in them fiercely.

You can teach a child fear
and still hand her the tools
with which she learns
to become free.

And the hardest truth
is not deciding
which memory was real.

It is learning to live
with the fact

they all were.

Auntie Trudis, Sit First

Forgive the child who thought you worked for us,
who saw your hands and named you by their use—
the sweeping, serving, scrubbing after supper,
and never thought to ask what you would choose.

They told me, “She is family.” I remember
how strangely that word stumbled in my head.
For family rested, laughing at the table,
while you were standing, serving us instead.

You waited ’til each plate and glass were tended,
then sat when everyone had found their place.
You made yourself so small, so soft, so silent,
as though even rest required your grace.

And then there was that bell. God, how I hate it—
that little handheld summons, sharp and slight.
They did not even need to call you, Auntie;
one ring, and you appeared within their sight.

I broke it.

I was young, but knew enough to know
that bell could tell you when to come and go.
I thought that breaking what could summon you
might break their claim to tell you what to do.

But they replaced it.

Bought another.

And somehow that still hurts me more:
I broke the thing they used to summon you;
they brought another summons through the door.

Years later, when we crossed the sea returning,
the world had changed, yet you were serving still.
The years had widened life for everybody;
for you, the same four walls, the same old will.

That Sunday, everyone was dressed for worship.
I asked if you could come with us to pray.
He said no.

I found you on the staircase,
crying softly as we walked away.

Auntie, I still see you on those stairs.
That image has outlived the house, the years:
everyone leaving there to pray for mercy
while mercy sat behind them shedding tears.

They went to kneel before a kneeling Savior—
the Christ who washed another’s feet with care—
and left behind the woman who had served them
to weep alone upon a shadowed stair.

If Christ was anywhere that Sunday evening,
I cannot think He waited in their pew.
I think He sat beside you on that staircase
and let the others go without you two.

You told me men had wished to marry you,
that love had tried to lead you somewhere new.
But someone else decided you should stay there,
as though your life were his to give or refuse.

They kept your hands, your labor, and your lifetime,
then paid you—as though payment made it right.
You raised their children, then their children’s children,
and gave whole generations day and night.

You made yourself so small that we grew larger.
You bent so every branch could find the sun.
Like roots beneath a tree that no one praises,
you fed the fruit and asked to harvest none.

You had a thousand reasons to grow hardened,
yet hardness never settled in your face.
I knew you first through gentle, grieving eyes
and through a shy smile still alive with grace.

That is the saint I carry when I name you—
not halo, hymn, or statue dressed in gold,
but someone given every cause for hardness
who somehow still chose tenderness to hold.

I wish I’d known enough to see you sooner—
the woman underneath the work and wear.
I wish I’d pulled your chair out at the table
and said, “Sit down. We’ll serve you. Leave it there.”

I wish I could return to that dark Sunday
and find you halfway up those shadowed stairs.
I would not follow everyone to worship.
I’d sit beside you in the darkness there.

I’d say, “Let them go pray without us, Auntie.
If God is good, then God already knows:
no hymn beneath a chapel roof is holier
than staying with the one they chose to leave alone.”

And I would tell you what I understand now:
the shame was never yours to bear or hide.
They called you family while keeping you in service;
the smallness belonged to those who stood aside.

They never asked what life you might have wanted,
yet loved your giving more than they loved you.
A child believed the word because they taught her.
A woman knows the word was never true.

So hear me now, wherever you are resting:
I see the woman childhood failed to see.
Not hands beside a sink. Not someone summoned.
Not what you gave to us—
but who you were to me.

And if I carry any quiet kindness,
if tenderness still lives beneath my skin,
if I know humble never means unworthy,
then, Auntie, you are where that truth begins.

I hope that Heaven has no bells to call you.
No dishes wait. No footsteps seek you still.
I hope God speaks your name and asks you softly,
What do you want?
And waits to hear your will.

I hope a chair is waiting at His table—
not last, not earned, not granted out of guilt.
A place no one can ring you from, my Auntie,
a rest no other hands can make you yield.

You spent your whole life rising when they called you.
You spent your whole life waiting for your turn.
They made you last.

But you believed the promise:
the last shall be the first.

So sit, Auntie.

Let us stand.

Family Reunion

When I have tried to date an Asian man,
the dead and living gather.

A cousin rises in the cheek,
an uncle lingers in the smile,
my father flickers through the eyes
and stays there for a while.

Sometimes blood remembers further—

a grandfather before the gray,
his brothers before the years grew old,
sepia faces slipping free of frames,
returning young from photographs I hold.

My family has never lacked for beauty.

There are handsome men among the branches,
one beautiful enough to model,
to make a living beneath strangers’ glances,
while blood keeps watch beneath it all.

For blood is a brutal chaperone.

Once recognition takes its seat,
desire rises, gathers its coat;
no candlelight can make kin strange,
no spark survives inside the throat.

Even the man between two bloodlines,
white woven through his Asian side,
came carrying generations of money
and every comfort wealth could provide.

He told me
I could be set for life.

I studied his face,
then an old photograph—

and there was my uncle
looking back.

I showed him.

Because wealth may open every door,
may buy the view, the room, the space—
but money cannot loosen blood from bone
or make me unknow a familiar face.

So I learned to look beyond the table,
past branches bending near,
toward faces untouched by family,
faces memory cannot mirror.

And rarely,
one appears—

no cousin carved into the cheekbone,
no uncle waiting in the grin,
no father flickering through the eyes,
no grandfather gathering beneath the skin.

At last,
a stranger.

At last,
a face my blood has never claimed.

And he passes without seeing me.

So the reunion keeps its cruel symmetry:

the men who look my way
arrive already named,

and the men I might have wanted
leave
before learning mine.

In Their Hands

The hardening of the heart began in childhood,
not all at once, but grain by grain—
a little limestone learning pressure,
a little softness schooled by pain.

First came the yelling through the walls,
then truth turned crooked in their mouths,
then fingers pinched until they bloodied,
then palms, then fists, then darker bouts.

Black became blue.
Blue yellowed underneath the skin.
And every bruise became a mineral
the body buried deeper in.

Then abandonment—
the oldest quarrying of all:
to learn the hands that built your shelter
could be the hands that let you fall.

The pressure followed into adolescence:
first goodbye, betrayal, slammed door;
each new fracture found the fault lines
left by everything before.

Then came the man with honeyed words,
with gunpowder and whiskey in the pour—
they seeped into the marble’s fractures
and stained what pressure cracked before.

Grief became graphite.
Anger became iron.
Fear became fault lines
where tenderness had been.

Until one day
what once was flesh had finished changing:
cold,
veined,
beautiful perhaps,
but no longer beating.

Marble.

It lay for years beneath the dust—
hard among hard things, alone.
Some saw only scars and passed.
Some wanted easier stone.

No one stayed long enough
to wonder what slept beneath the gray—
the buried bronze,
the ghosted green,
the colors dust had dulled away.

Until one day a sculptor

stopped.

He studied every scar and seam,
as though the fractures were not failures,
but maps of something still unseen
beneath the hardened layers.

He did not lift the chisel first.

His hands brought water—
clear and cool as a hidden spring—
and watched the sleeping stone grow darker,
watched buried colors bloom within.

The dust ran down.
The veins rose vivid.
Gold glimmered underneath the gray.
What others called impurity
became the reason he would stay.

A practiced hand knows marble
remembers everywhere it strained;
one careless strike along a fracture
can split what pressure has sustained.

So he learned each fault line faithfully—
where hammer might meet stone,
where force could free what waited there,
and where restraint alone.

Chisel.
Pause.
Chisel.
Listen.

Not every blow was meant to break it.
Some released what stone had stored.

Then came the polishing—
slow circles, soft cloth, steady hands—
not sanding scars into surrender,
but learning where the marble stands.

Again.
Again.
Again.

Until the buried colors brightened,
every vein brought into view—
not white,
not flawless,
not untouched,
but wholly, deeply true.

The iron made the amber.
The graphite made the gray.
The fractures gave the mineral-rich water
somewhere to make its way.

What wounded it
had altered it.
What altered it
had made it rare.
Only someone willing to look closely
would ever find the colors there.

When the sculptor stepped away,
he did not claim the work as his.
He did not say,
“I saved you.”
He did not say,
“I made you this.”

He simply looked at what had always waited
beneath the dust, beneath the years,
beneath the heat and hammering,
beneath the hardened layers of fear.

And whispered,

“I saw you.”

Then somewhere deep beneath the marble,
beneath each vein, beneath each scar,
something stirred where stone had settled—
faint,
then fuller,
then not so far.

For the sculptor had not given it a heartbeat.
That was never his to impart.

His hands had only held it gently
where other hands had left their mark,
long enough for stone to remember

it was still
a heart.

The Last Hand

It came from Lucifer’s own furnace—
a blade first tempered under flame,
its iron black with something older
than any living hand could name.

The first edge drank from Hell itself,
then crossed from fire into blood;
what Lucifer had forged in darkness,
generations honed for harm.

No living hand could name the first
that learned to bear the hilt before.
Each hand that gripped it drew the edge
against another whetstone’s core.

Palm after palm became its sharpener,
each cruelty honing what came through—
not merely carrying the weapon,
but making Hell’s old edge feel new.

The rust grew thick along the steel,
yet still the blade could split the skin.
The Devil may have forged the iron;
human hands kept honing it.

The blade came clothed in gilded sheath,
bright enough to earn a bow—
gold burnished smooth by generations
who praised the gleam, not what lay below.

Its surface bore the names of honor,
duty, custom, blood, respect;
old violence beaten into ornament
until the hidden edge looked blessed.

They kissed the gold, ignored the stain,
buffed every blemish from the shell;
the sheath protected not the wounded,
but kept the blade concealed too well.

Then came the woman holding next,
her fingers closing round the blade—
flesh learning how to cradle fire,
how wounds can masquerade as faith.

She held until her palm went pale,
until the metal drank her red,
until the wound forgot to close
and silence learned to speak instead.

Whenever skin began to seal,
the edge returned, precise and thin.
What chance has flesh to heal at all
when steel keeps entering again?

And when her fingers opened last,
the weapon did not cool or cease.
The hands before still held the hilt;
they passed the sharpened edge to me.

So I received it like a rite—
the eldest always takes her turn.
I closed my fingers round the blade
and learned how quietly flesh can burn.

I held it when the heat climbed bone.
I held it while the steel cut through.
They kept the hilt within their hands;
I took the edge they handed through.

stay closed,
stay still,
stay useful,
call each blister something owed,
hide the blood beneath the sleeve,
carry what was never yours to hold.

Rust loosened deep into the wound
and worked its poison through my veins.
The wound no longer stayed a wound—
it learned my pulse, it learned my name.

Still I held on, not understanding
a blade need not be raised to kill;
rust can travel toward the heart
while the hand is holding still.

Then one night every scar spoke plainly,
and this was all it had to say:

A hand cannot remain a hand
if all it does is hold a blade.

There would be nothing left of me—
no palm to touch, no pulse to save,
only bone still clenched around
the thing they taught me to call brave.

So I let go.

It struck the ground
with less thunder than I had feared.
No heavens split. No mountains fell.
The ones I loved had not disappeared.

The flesh would close, but never clear
the map the metal burned behind.
Some scars survive beneath the skin;
some rust stays buried in the mind.

And still—I chose the scar.
I chose the hand that could remain.
Better marked by what I survived
than buried gripping that same blade.

At first, an empty hand felt wrong.
The quiet almost felt untrue.
I had been taught that love meant holding
whatever hurt was handed to you.

Then other hands appeared in time—
not bound to mine by vein or name.
They did not ask me for my scars.
They did not warm another flame.

They washed the rust from broken skin.
They bound what blood had left undone.
They taught my fingers other work:
to open, offer, touch, receive.

No weapon hidden in their palms.
No debt disguised as sacrifice.
No tally kept of what I gave.
No love that came attached to price.

And when the wound had finally closed,
I faced the weapon one last time.
For once, I reached not for the blade—
my fingers closed around the hilt.

I carried it to God’s own house
and plunged it into water blessed.
It hissed and spat; the hellfire died,
steam writhing from its iron chest.

I turned its point toward where it came
and hurled it down through ash and flame.
It struck at Lucifer’s own foot
and pinned him to the earth he claimed.

Let Hell keep what Hell fashioned.
Let that iron hold him there.
He will not cross the line I’ve drawn.
He will not come near me and mine.

My daughter will inherit my hand—
but she will never inherit the blade.

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