To reach Mother on the mainland Empire,
we flew paper planes to Henry Hudson Hotel—
stopover for foreign nurses enlisted
at $7 an hour in the War on AIDS.
We the pacified wards of the First World—
our relations symbiotic in posterity.
Dear Nanang, what did you see waking to
morning in America? Insular white walls.
Windows overlooking huddled masses.
Winter cracking tropical leather shoes.
To enter the G-9 ward, you donned two pairs of gloves,
a mask under a face shield, a yellow jumpsuit—
as if patients were no longer men or mothers,
humanity leeching as the virus bloomed.
Alien. Exile. Invisible. Shared names marooning
you on an island off the land of the free.
Perhaps it’s why you battled hand in glove, though
you weren’t the white nurse patients demanded.
Perhaps they feared your unknown origin like
the plague that twined your fates in purgatory.
Still, you could walk between worlds—out west
where the Hudson rippled gold at sunset.
Before Hudson, it was Muhheakantuck,
River that runs both ways. From freshwater
where human-sized sturgeon spawned before circling
back to sea. This estuary, a time machine—
migratory passage for millennia,
replenished by rain, snowmelt, and the pull of
sun and moon. Dear Nanang, what did you dream
on that teeming shore? Yesterdays and tomorrows.
The Atlantic flowing into the Pacific—
arterial pathways Home.
—
Vina Orden is a writer based in Lenapehoking/New York City whose work has appeared in Asian Journal, CUNY Forum, The FilAm, The Halo-Halo Review, hella pinay, Hyperallergic, and The Margins. As senior poetry editor at Slant’d magazine, Vina supports and amplifies other emerging Asian American writers. She also is working on her first novel for young adults and has received fellowships from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Kweli, Roots. Wounds. Words., and Tin House.
