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Listen to the poet read “Coffee Ages”:
For my dad.
Memory is a poet, not a historian.
— Kaitlan Bui
Lately, I’ve confused my memories with my what-ifs.
What if we’d been sleepwalking on small-talk?
___Travelled so far forward that we’d wound back the clock
all the way to the IGA loading dock…
Lunch break. Two crates.
One, an upturned table for two iced coffees from Café Nhớ,
McCain’s bolognese, and rambutan for dessert.
I’ve grabbed an extra can of condensed milk from the shop
__so that my cà phê sữa đá is 10% coffee and 90% sweetener
Am I still too young to understand, Dad?
You say,
Too sweet.
The second crate is a throne you give me. The hard plastic
softens around my sore skeleton. You squat
______amongst the wooden pallets.
You were stumblin’ in late last night. 3am. Breath smelling
__of Heineken and throat raspy
from the karaoke. An uncle chants
___________________‘Encore!’
‘One more!’
‘One more!’
‘Making Love Out of Nothing At All!’
Air Supply leads you into the fresh start
_of the same morning.
Canterbury road hasn’t changed much
in the 24 years you’ve been driving on it—
only the placement of the potholes, filled with mudwater the colour of
__the Moccona you drink, alone.
_______Dad, maybe our talk is small
___because you can’t see just how large your life is in my eyes. If you read yourself
through my eyes, you wouldn’t be joking
_______i’m illegible— illiterate— illegal—
______ You are not
_________what you are not.
But you think I’m too smart
to work 10 hour shifts stacking shelves,
scanning barcodes, washing fruit
__for the rest of my life.
‘Bella, you have so much potential,’ you say.
__________________‘You’re too artsy for this place.’
What is this loading dock if not a depository for my sepia dreams?
What if I’m the one in the empty van, driving away?
Our very arrivals are a reminder of our departure.
_You would know.
I think this moment is less a memory and more a what-if.
I seem to confuse the two these days,
But I swear this next one is real:
April 26th. Your fake birthday.
Do you mourn, on this date, the way your real date of birth burned
in a basket of documents
______beneath your bed?
7 years old, your whisper penetrates the hardwood:
______1968
______________19___68
6___ 8
eight–
it doesn’t occur to you to remember the rest.
______as if to tell me a bedtime story
only it’s dark, and the torch you shine under your chin
______is broken.
____________There will come a time, you narrate,
__________________when the bomb cannot be disarmed—
______it must do what it was wired to do.
_______We’ll have no option but
to absorb the explosion; make a bed of your body
______for the shrapnel
____________so that it chooses to hurt you
____________and no one else. We cannot blame
__________________the bomb for exploding—
only the human who armed it.
Is the better question then, Are you happy?
______Yes, you say.
Do you mourn?
______Yes, you say.
______but I’ll never worry about going hungry.
You made sure of it, Dad. Stored a tupperware container
_of gold coins in the cupboard in case
______we wanted to purchase from the canteen. Our milk crates aren’t chairs,
but storage baskets
_for our birth certificates.
______the fancy one that baristas use
haggled with the Viet guy at Bing Lee to get 30% off
(but you could’ve shaved off more).
all you must do is load the ammunition
Crush. Pulverise.
Whole, the beans are imprisoned in their own shells.
Broken, they are aromatic.
______Compress. Extract.
____________Should vulnerability feel this violent?
By the time I’ve sipped away the white froth,
my coffee is sepia in the stream of sunlight,
______the kind of sepia
_that saturates old photos
that colours your earliest memory in Australia:
We lived in Burwood when we got here
you narrate
Rent was $60 a week, your Gong made $100.
When Gong met the landlady, he saw, for the first time,
blue eyes and blonde hair. Said ‘everyone here looks like
______colour television!
We’ve been transported into the future.’
Gong’s story barely escapes your sepia breath.
______I barely escape myself.
______Lately, I’ve been dreaming in sepia
because my colour restoration of the past could
_never pass the test of time. I can be
______careless in practice
______but not you
You tamp as if you were toiling the garden. Collect the grounds into a container for compost
because you can’t bear the thought of loss—
not a grain, not a ground.
______All life is precious.
You brew the coffee
______Watch the water pass through the granules
You’ve been there before,
______squashed in a makeshift container,
you dreamed of passing through the water
______only to have it pass through you—
came out soaking
______called it
____________surviving.
Lately I’ve confused my memories with my what ifs.
What if it wasn’t the war
_that brought you here?
What if it was the what ifs that never became the what is—
It seems that your secret to making love out of nothing at all
is to expect nothing at all
_Love, you say,
__________is unconditional
After all that
pummel–______grind–
pressure–_____ extraction–
_you pour a blobby heart
______watch it wobble
___and say,
Isn’t it pretty?
This poem was originally written and performed for ‘A Cup of Care,’ a community open day hosted by Fairfield City Museum and Gallery.,
Annabella Quỳnh Luu (she/her) is a Vietnamese-Australian writer, slam poet, and perennial student from southwestern Sydney. For Annabella, poetry is a way to access the tenderness of our hardened selves. Her work sustains an ongoing conversation between her cultural heritage and her experiences as a second-generation daughter of refugees living on Darug Land.
Annabella studies English, Creative Writing, and Screen Production at UNSW. Her family, friends, and writing community are the lifeblood and core audience for her writing. They have inspired her to learn Vietnamese.
Annabella has performed her poetry at Sydney Opera House, the Museum of Contemporary Art, FCMG, Sydney Town Hall, Bankstown Poetry Slam, West-Side Poetry Slam, UNSW and most notably, in front of her dogs. She has published her writing in Platform 1 with Story Factory and featured on FBi Radio. She has also exhibited her visual artworks at AGNSW, Tweed Regional Gallery, and PYT Fairfield.
