Poem

Kevin Minh Allen

CON LAI

Even as I stood in line at the ticket counter,
people pointed and whispered that I was a mongrel;
fathered by an inferior and raised by a whore.

My stepfather beat me whenever he found me sound asleep.
Some mornings the neighbors woke to hear him yell that
the son of a devil should never be allowed
to walk in the shoes of an innocent man.

Many nights, drunk and out of control,
I wanted to extract that foreigner from my body.
Took a razor to my stomach and counted the days till my departure.
My skin replaced layer upon layer, up and over
the calloused vertebrate of my nightmares.

The other half-breeds and I used to sleep next to the newsstand
and sell snacks to people on their way to work.
We would fight with the new arrivals straight out of prison
and recognized our own when school kids skipped by singing,
"Con lai, go back to America!"

Kevin Minh Allen

Kevin Minh Allen was born Nguyen Duc Minh near Saigon, Vietnam on December 5, 1973 to a Vietnamese woman and American father, both of whom remain unknown to him. In 1974, Kevin was adopted by white parents and grew up with two younger sisters in a suburb of Rochester, NY. He moved to Seattle, WA in September 2000. Kevin's poetry appears in such literary journals as Chrysanthemum, HazMat Literary Magazine, Poetry Superhighway and Green Tricycle.

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