Until age seven, all the boats you knew barrelled through
a technicolour sea, a Barbie swinging from the rope
or a pirate of the Caribbean with that
fantastic plastic glow, that airbrushed sea spray. Then history said
refugees smuggled gold in their rectums, made banks
of their bodies only to have them robbed
by a barrelling pirate, a simple swell. Then poetry said
your parents smuggled their language in their gut, a hands-free place
that was never capsized, airbrushed, thrown overboard. How quickly
the fairytales were drowned by the cautionary tale.
In the sequel your only migration
is from soft to solids, boneless to bony cá kho
and ‘to parent’ then became ‘to warn’. All they ever say from the gut is
coi chừng xương__watch out for the fish bones
coi chừng xe _____watch out for cars
coi chừng nóng ______watch out, it’s hot; even a cup of tea can scald your tongue
Every warning makes you wonder how much has gone wrong
maybe this is why you wade through girlhood waiting for
the worst. No matter how many times Mẹ tell you coi chừng
a girl in your class comes to school in a cast
she was hit on the way to meet a fairytale man
that bade her J-walk across the ages of thirteen and thirty
you get scalded by a friend you thought was warm
and, having failed to sift the sharp from the soft,
the fish bone gets caught in your throat. Even as you wait
for it to pass through your oesophagus,
you marvel at how your mother survived it all
—the crash, the capsize, the robbery—
long enough to deliver the warning to her daughter
in a bedtime story.
Antoinette Luu is a Vietnamese-Australian writer practising in south-west Sydney. Her poetry reconciles life in the diaspora, and how this life is at once burgeoning, threatened, loving, complicit and lived on unceded Darug land. Poetry is her praxis of empathy.
Antoinette is a three-time finalist at the Australian National Youth Poetry Slam. She is part of the poetic quartet, After All, who won Bankstown Poetry Slam’s Grand Slam 2025. She has published writing and performed poetry with numerous creative organisations, including the Australian Poetry Journal, Sydney Writers Festival, Sydney Fringe Festival, NSW Reconciliation, Riverside’s National Theatre of Parramatta, and FBi Radio.
