trying to remember an old conversation with an uncle

I don’t remember how this poem started,

after I wrote it I erased it

out of an overwhelming – feeling

that I knew what my uncle meant

when he said,

“I fucking hate black people.”

As I gaze out his messed up tinted

2006 Honda Civic window

A bag of nuts sitting where the radio used to be.

He means it when he says it, but he’s my uncle. So no,

 I won’t throw him out for it (as if I could).

It’s an odd moment, where for the first time I am trying to teach

Without teaching, trying to reach inside without asking, but

I ask anyways, looking away

through the cracked

window.

The evening is hot dust – rising

over black leather seats

and the barking of LA road rage

and smoke.

My uncle tells me how they used to beat him daily

called him chink, gook and so on.

It was his truth,

and undeniably a part of mine as well.

My mother once told me people tend to think truth is like an apple,

That if you eat away at it enough,

you will find the core;

But truth or truth/s rather

are complicated

multiple

like a bag of nuts sitting where the car radio used to be.

Truth was this evening, this 20 minute conversation

In the back of parking lot in my uncle’s car

You could say it was both a historical place where Koreans

felt a deep hate towards black people

in the fires of Rodney King

in the fires of their life’s work.

The 1992 LA Riots

The best if not the only

place to talk with him.

Like you

I also don’t know how to reach

For the car door or

truth/s.

But I want to ask him now if he thinks

That was the same kind of violence

as an officers knee on a black man’s head.

He looks at me, (or maybe my silence)

Nervously. My fingers rubbing a loose stitch on the car seat.

It is one thing to hate a man for beating you, another

to blame their blackness for beating you,

and another thing

entirely

to see the whiteness; the dust

around us.

he turns the car back on,

a grumbling start.