These poems were commissioned by Day Eight within a project funded by DC Mayor Muriel Bowser’s Office of AAPI Affairs, directed by Regie Cabico.

model minority as dessert
by reg ledesma

at the reception, a waiter emerges from the kitchen, a plate balancing on his right palm with a gleaming silver cloche lying on top. he is well-practiced, and he glides with ease across the dining hall, the tawny lights from the chandelier lending his pupils an eerie luminescence. intrigued, the white diners eye the cloche, curious about their next meal. the waiter rests the plate on the marble table. his brown fingers grip the top of the cloche, unveiling desert for ravenous hyenas. resting on the plate is a chocolate cake and two asian-american miniature figurines standing on top, replicas: one korean woman, one filipino man. they stand on top of the cake, a chocolate buttercream. the diners salivate, peering at the figurines, and the waiter departs swiftly. before consuming, they marvel and inspect. “look at the detail!” one gasps. “that one looks like my friend grace from college.” another diner points out the tortoise-shell glasses and slicked black hair of the filipino man. “how could anyone make this? and edible at that huh?” one touches the male replica, taking off his varsity harvard blazer. the figurine, half-naked, stares at the diner, through his glossy eyes, unmoving. the diner continues to disrobe the figurine, and the pants come off, exposing the replica. the other diners giggle at his brazenness, amused. without hesitation, he bites into the figurine, his yellow incisors dismembering its lower torso. an audible gulp. then, another bite before the figure disappears into the depths of his stomach. “delicious,” he said, “absolutely remarkable.”

migration euphemisms
by reg ledesma

in the seventh grade, i announced to my friends
that i was returning to the philippines.

i already knew how to fashion euphemisms. i was a poet, an expert on
language. “returning”–implied agency. “being deported to”

was too violent. the words were trapped under the roof of my mouth,
its violence compressed between borders.

each day was a dress rehearsal. i would slide on my
costume of model minority: quiet, smart, meek asian.

“my father is an engineer, my mother works as an accountant”.
i excelled at my assigned role, the lies i (we, they) told myself.

my costume clung to my skin, like a
cannibalistic adhesive.

one evening, i bought pokemon cards, deluxe edition
& my mother, trudging home & exhausted from the salon

cried and cried. “how much was that?” she bellowed.
& i ignored her, thought it was appropriate payment

for my role. & my father pulled us out of the filipino church when
we lost status, muttering about nosy parishioners, who would meddle in our business.

meddle in our faith. interrupt our prayers. & what kind of litany can i pray to God for
a reunion? what saint’s intercession can give us the power to return?

my mother believed america was an opportunity for her children–
a false idol she prayed to at night to keep her warm.

& she faithfully made trips to the western union like monthly homecomings.
remittances wired back as substitutes for our bodies.

& balikbayan boxes of our hand-me-downs our
cousins would slide on months later & this was how we touched across borders.

& calling cards to keep contact. & questions of when when when are you
coming home, please please please come home–supplications floating into the ether.
confined between borders. no definitive answer.

growing pains
by reg ledesma

in the cramped kitchen, one wall is cracked
the corner jutting out, streaks of smudged
black ink lining it.
two children stand, expectantly.

their father holds a pen, orders his son to
stand on the corner upright. the boy puffs his chest
trying to gain an extra inch. the father holds
the pen on top of his son’s head, etches his measurement

on the wall. he sighs, dissatisfied.
splayed out on the countertop, wrinkled, is a
growth chart. the father studies it as if it is a
crystal ball, a forecast of the future.

but really, he is just glaring at history’s ugly face.
decades prior in the philippines, brown bodies, lined up
searching for jobs. american colonizers
turned them away for being too “short”.

in the heat of the san joaquin valley, filipino farmworkers
stooped over, their spines bent, little brown brothers
excavating the white man’s weeds. brown hands picking,
picking, picking. white farm owners towering over them.

american journalists, on trips to manila,
peered at the brown bodies their eyes
like ravenous crows, hungry with voyeurism.
filipinos, they wrote were “very low of stature”, while americans were “giants”.

here, in the kitchen, the father
barks at his son to drink more milk.
he is trying to save his son from a genetic destiny
but history is inescapable.

brooklyn
by reg ledesma

i started the summer, with bated breath,
my naive excitement evaporated in the heat of the city, as i emerged up the subway stairs.

the blaring car horns, like calloused hands slapping me in the face
the permanent stench of piss pushed me off balance.

the sun, relentless, burned my face in my carelessness and laughed.
here i was: capitulating to a city i once romanticized in my dreams.

faces on the street were unmarked and foreign.
here, there was nothing familiar; and slowly, the city consumed me whole.

what was worse, i thought? the silence of my thoughts back home or
the violence of this new city?

Reg Ledesma is a queer first generation Filipino writer based in DC. They are a graduate of Duke University’s Master of Public Policy program and a Jack Kent Cooke scholar. Their writing explores topics such as Asian diaspora, colonization, historical revisionism in the Philippines, and queerness. In their free time, they co-organize the DC Liwanag Filipino-American Literature Festival.

Featured image in this post is: “Dumbo, Brooklyn, New York City” by Linda Fletcher, 2022, creative commons via wikimedia