We stand in the kitchen
drying the dinner dishes
placing them on their shelves,
quietly, civilized:
a few words mis-said
some points made with well-aimed arrows.
We are quiet, civilized
simmering.

The refrigerator hums.
The clock ticks.
The earth spins.
The plates clack against each other
as they are placed in neat piles.
The earth spins.
The clock ticks.
The refrigerator hums.

I sigh to let off steam.
His chest rises and falls
as air hisses
from his lips.
We sigh in unison.
It is not the soft satisfied sigh
we share as aftermath
tucked together like spoons
when our sighs coincide.
It is more like the sigh we share
stuck
in city traffic, horns
blaring, cabbies cutting in
and out.
The look in his eyes those times
--this time?--
holds a longing for a home not here,
a place sweeter and more serene.

“I stay go,” he says,
pidgin English, Hawaii-style,
with a syntax all its own.
They teach the kids in school there
to speak the language properly
losing the lilt, the Pacific breeze
the palms’ sway
to communicate in the monotone
of the broader world.
“I stay go,” he says,
letting his words sing
their own tune.

“I stay go”
means I am going.
But I find comfort in
its strange oxymoron sense:
The constancy of going
is in stay
so, of course,
it means what it says
and doesn’t.