1.
Don’t you get out of my hair, 爸, don’t you stop
your big sneeze ways, your boogers of 爸 truth
flying across the kitchen, skipping right over a pot of soup
to which you’ve just added your chili flakes, then out
the sliding glass door, across
the city, to land in the unruly field
of my bangs, where they’ve always
belonged, bless you. Don’t you stop loving me, 爸. This
& all your ways.

Don’t you get out of my teeth, 妈, don’t you leave
my teeth so sadly
spinachless, your mega-green
strands of 妈 knowing & wise
ribbing stuck in this abundance of crooked
teeth, thank you. Don’t you
stop loving me, either.
Never. This, 妈, & every way
of yours. 

2.
爸妈, don’t you stop giving me
grief, but don’t you ever (I know) make me (I know) grieve
you (it’s impossible
not to, one day).

3.
爸妈, 我疼你—how is it now my turn to say it to you?
Except really
about you, & to other people, just as I’m sure
you’ve said it. This way. To closest friends.
To your 爸妈.
我疼他.

我疼他们, I want to say to my closest
about you. The two of. The 疼
that taps on my shoulder, tugs me by the ear
to our history again.
Again, your faces
in my words.

4.
疼 as in ache. pain. pang. your faces. 疼
as another way to say爱,

我疼你 as another way to sing 我爱你,
but pangfully,

like an ache in my most crooked tooth,
song of my longest hair.

5.
疼, to tend, to be tender, to attend
each other’s lives. 疼 as in our lives have hurt
each other—why?

疼 as in the wish to become another world
for you, far away

from this world
that imagines (when did you know) you,
prefers (that imagination could wreck) you

a thing, wishes you
& me dead.

6.
疼, which contains 冬,
which means winter.
Likely a sonic borrowing, since 疼 is téng, 冬 is dōng—
probably, at an earlier time, they lived closer
in sound. Winter, living

beneath the roof-like 疒 radical, meaning “sickness.”
To be sick in the heart of winter. No.
To be sick with a winter’s heart. No.
To be sick with winter for you—is that the love
I feel? A perpetual inner

December? Does to love mean to worry, to be a worrier
on the snowy field of another’s face?
Once, you said you were worried
I’d get my brothers, your other (truer?) sons, sick.
More than once. The both of you. Said. This.

Sick with what, neither of you could say
out loud. Get out before you get them sick, too.
& now the country we live in believes everyone with a face
like ours is sick. Our sick faces, sick countries, go back
before you get us sick.

7.
Winter,
in a word that means shield & shattered, roof
& rain, a love that hurts to give,
receive. Have I wanted
to hurt you back? Did my poems
hurt you? Do I want these words to wound?

8.
疼, a family, tending
to each other’s history—is this tenderness, such 疼

possible? 疼, I want to see its roof-
like 疒 radical as a roof over us, & we’re warmed, warming
up to each other again. For now, the 疼 we have, are: a December

ache, windy
loving, this don’t you stop 冬天 field
full of my to-you,

for-you words, 爸, my shivers, 妈, tender
as snow & silver as falling.