I spent my nineteenth birthday at my grandparents’.

On Tuesday, October 17th, Dr. Craig Santos Perez, a professor of English at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa and prolific poet and essayist, held a poetry reading in UCLA’s Kaplan Hall.

A satirical poem detailing the ways a specific APIDA culture is interpreted amongst different perspectives.

0. THE LOVERS. There was once a bard and a king, a lover of words and a lover of swords, that came to meet one another in the kingdom they both ruled. They were kind sovereigns, adored by their acolytes and their subjects, and they knew the other…

1. Back when I was in elementary school, Mother used to pin up my hair with chopsticks—soft pink with cherry blossoms creeping along its narrow circumference. The silky threadlike strands of hair that hung from the top of my head never stayed up for longer than a few…

My mother propagates plants next to the kitchen sink, slipping cuttings into plastic bottles, laying seeds down in shallow dishes. They soak, stagnant, in their isolated pools of water. In between cycles of dishwashing, my mother watches them. She waters them. She sets them towards the sun, these…