A boy runs shoeless onto the front lawn
as we pull our rental Ford Focus - good american car
into this subdivided slice of
prefabricated suburbia.

Here, women without husbands and
children with nighttime memories for daddys
make trips to wholesalers and auto mechanics
on repaid time.

The price of gas is no deterrent to freeway travel.

His mother, now pregnant with a third,
tells us she can only cook American food,
apologizes as I approach
a second helping of ribs.

Her kitchen, decorated with rosewood:
“From Okinawa,” she says. “we were there for 3 years.”

Now in Southern California
where the world outside gated military housing
speaks our American language
but still confusing without the help of translators.

He, five-year-old soccer star,
draws us pictures of crocodiles
labelled “alligator” or sometimes
with just the artist’s name, “dylan” -

tells me he always sits on the green at kindergarten
where children fall in line for recess
and nobody talks about Iraq.

Now it’s past his bedtime
his brother is already sleeping and Dylan is acting up
like he usually does
when mommy wants him to lie down
and he misses his father,

he’s not sleepy, just growing up too fast,
just learning too much about what’s real,
just knowing himself too well.

“But I want to be doing something, not just lying in bed,”
his mother holds him as he sings himself to sleep,
cries that he misses his daddy.
And when he finally tires himself out,
she cries too and knows tomorrow
it’ll happen again.

copyright Giles Li, 2006