This, An Approximation of Pain:

The long rod, made of horse-whip and
                         white lightning, cracking violent static
as it curved through the air. The
                         lashes on the back, counting I love
you on a D flat minor scale I had
                         wrestled the night to learn, crying we
all want something we can’t have.
                         That golden child opening doors
across a suburban sky. That sky folding
                         into lullabies beneath our skin. When you darkened
your face with ash from the pipes, sank beneath
                         the gap between the floorboards to the sound of
AK-47s splitting the air, you told yourself
                         this was not the life you wanted. When you survived
a sky lampooned with silvered blisters and orange fires
                         to be denied school, you hoped that
the apple should fall further from the tree.
                         The tree: a wilted hollow, excavating
prayers from the trabeculous rattle of loved ones. Her
                         apple, bloated from epicanthal salt, drifts aimless
on a harbour of ghosts.
                         I’m tired of these white-marbled
graves for our language of love.
                         How we made weak humour from unfinished
pain : Exhausting the metaphor of a tiger parent :
                         Injecting memories like napalm through the veins.
You cracked the cane and saw the faces
                         of the men who stormed your home—
the knife, a pillar of salt,
                         in your hand—reciting incantations
of their virtue and strength as they struck
                         a fist into the ancestral altar.
When the last note echoed
                         through our porcelain home, the bamboo rod
rippled like lightning or the whistle of the bullet
                         of a soldier rushing the pews of a church,
and you made a soldier
                         the only way you knew how.