Imperatrix Mundi

My piece Imperatrix Mundi has been accepted for the Asian American Women Artists' Association show, A Place of Her Own, opening in San Francisco in early May. It's an homage to my grandmother, who raised ten children while operating a workingman's hotel in Stockton, CA. She was even more diminutive than Napoleon, but she ruled her world through love and compassion, not a quest for power.

Right now the work exists only as a photocollage thumbnail. I have been asked to paint it as a large canvas, 3 x 5 feet. I agreed, thinking it would be wonderful to put paint to canvas again after a long foray into other media. I've bought the canvas and stretcher bars and ordered the frame. Now all I have to do is find the time to paint.

Grandma’s House 

My dad’s mom runs a hotel south of the canal, a cheap SRO in the middle of the block 

between the pool hall and the Jesus mission where the open door reveals 

rows of stoic men slumped in folding chairs pretending to listen to the preacher 

and waiting, waiting for a chance to sleep on one of the iron beds 

lined up like soldiers with white sheets pulled drum tight.

My mom parks our two-tone blue Pontiac outside the liquor store 

stocked with golden pints of brandy, port and muscatel.

She checks her lipstick in the rearview mirror. She makes sure her stocking seams are straight

and my ponytail is so tight it makes my scalp ache.

She makes a beeline down the vomit-splattered street to Grandma’s hotel

past the broken men in broken shoes, in pants tied up with rope.

She does not look at the Army-green trouser leg neatly folded,safety-pinned, and dangling slackly where a limb should be, 

She’s blind to the gap-toothed, yellowing ivories, the grey-stubble lined with spittle, 

the passed-out drunk lying twisted on the ground just as he fell, wreathed in the sweet, stale fumes of cheap wine.

“Single Rooms • Daily • Weekly • Monthly” reads the sign on Baachan’s hotel.

The door is checked and chalky with age and the entrance reeks of piss. 

"Don't touch the walls," my mother says.  She gathers her skirts tightly

so they will not brush the stamped metal wainscotting 

painted institutional green and stained with grease from many hands. 

Baachan is waiting for us at the top of the stairs, at the end of a long hall lined with bleak single rooms. 

A tiny woman, skinny as the broom she wields, as crooked as the teeth jammed any which way into her mouth.

“Yokatta, ne!” she says when she sees us. “Isn’t it good.” “Namu Amida Butsu, I pay homage to the Buddha.” And as she beams, it IS good. All of it— the ten kids she raised in this skid-row hotel,

the drunks, the deadbeats, the bums who call her “Mama” and eat her free Sunday chili,

From drunks to nervous mothers to little girl with eyes like cameras.

Nothing escapes the embrace of Baachan’s compassionate view.

Going to see her is like visiting the sun.

Published in Empty Shoes: Poems on the Hungry and Homeless (Popcorn Press 2009)