GET OUT
BY DENISE HANH HUYNH

You smash his blue car in
with a baseball bat—paint GET OUT
on his hood in yellow

acrylics. We are not
welcome here. But we have not been
welcome here since the year

1875.
My body still won’t be welcome
after I bleach myself

with skin products or make
whiter children with taller men
I’m unsettled about

fucking. The white woman
at the shoot thrusts plastic orange
cheddar in my hands. She

tells me the snack table
is running low on cheese. She’s scared
to touch me. I may be

infected with china
virus but she’ll eat squares of cheese
she tells me to put out. My

yellow hands must ferment
raw milk better. I want to tell
women like her: Go fool

the others. Yes, I see
you bullshit us from all the way
across my long river—

but I have a cancer
on my mind so I say nothing.
Breast tumors will not kill

me before I eat soft
blueberries & grapes with Viet &
Khmer men who do not

need to say any words
to know loss. We still need to eat.
I still chop up shallots

& garlic & jagged
oyster mushrooms for my fried eggs.

& you. You will go &

wipe your paint off the hood
but I won’t forget what you said
or what you did to us.

Asian American Studies Journal, edited by Tiffany Bui, Kaelin Pham & Meredith Song, University of Minnesota, 2021.