Ayo’s Reviews > Becoming Ghost: Poetry > Status Update

“History is being viewed on the television, through the eyes of a white American. The fact is, my parents were barely visible through the veil of that gaze. They were the props of empire. Characters with short time and no lines.”


Wow!!! I loved read this book 😍❤️🥰

“We chant, Stop the genocide!

But the election presses on. Blue or red, it’s genocide.”

Oh girl!!! You are shaking the table. Do we talk about these things in books now??? 🫢

“My mother says, In Vietnam, a life means so little. What does a life mean in America?

. . .Last year, the average American paid $5,109 to the U.S. military.”

💔😍❤️

She said:

“Once I dreamt I was swallowed by a snake. The snake was an immigrant household.”

OMG! OMG! Girl what??? *standing ovation*

😧😍❤️

“We didn’t have lines, we were “extras.” We’d survived a war to be cast into the margins of our own story. They say that cameras steal your souls. Sometimes, they do.

Sometimes, they pay minimum wage, which is more per hour than I earned an entire year working as an apprentice to a tailor.”

💔🥰❤️

“Daughter, I think you embellish what you don’t know. A bomb is nothing like a slammed door.

That is just your poetic imagination.

Have you seen a tree disappear into flames?

That’s what a bomb can do.”

💔😍❤️

“If I must tessellate this aloneness, it is this I most crave, to be done with aubades.

I want to stay here, with you, our backs against the water, starlings blotting out the sky.

I press my palms to my eyes and imagine a bloodless world. What moves through me is just wind and your breath.

I hold it as we march toward our own lives”


Oh wow!!! So beautiful 😍🥹❤️

“The tectonic universe shifts and we are forced to move like birds fleeing the seasons.

I will not move.

Not today.”

😍❤️😍