Recovery Poem by Bryan Thao Worra

Staring at my mother‟s former home her
Old neighbors show me proudly:

Old wounds. Boarded up, every dusty nailed window
Denies my eyes that would dare prize such

A worn hovel, root of my restless conjectures.

It‟s anticlimactic.

The house is a shingled blank, what‟s left,
What remains.

They tell me Ive come all this way
But she‟s already in California.

They ask me to show them where it is,
Compared to where I live.

I may as well tell them about
Quarks and fission, or the mechanics
Of perpetual motion, but draw the map
Anyway.

I know I should cry, but smile,
Defying the one thousand ways
Things could have been worse.

We call my mother from a Vientiane phone.

Her first words to me ever are: “Hi, Honey,
How do you like my country? ”

And I never wanted to get out of one place
So fast as this moment,

Wishing I was a kiss that could reach
Through an ocean of wires, alive,

Alive and distant.