For my girlfriend, English is her third language

and I imagine it getting the bronze medal, standing
next to Mandarin with the silver and Vietnamese

with the gold and Finnish not even being able
to compete as she doesn’t speak a word of it.

And for the anniversary of our first date she made me
an apron that said KILL THE COOK and I explained

the difference between KILL and KISS and she asked me
how long it takes someone to make an entire apron,

not just buying an apron and writing on it, but making
a whole apron, and she told me nothing was misspelled

on the gift that I bought her because I purchased
the spelling and I said that she didn’t misspell KISS

but rather turned it into another word and she took
the apron back on a day when I went to buy vermicelli

and grape juice and when I asked what she did with it
she told me that she kissed the apron and that I could

kill the apron good-bye and later when I tried to kiss her
she pulled away and said that she wanted to keep her lips,

that she did not want them to end up like the American dead,
how we put relatives in the ground and then keep them there

forever, that even our cemeteries are a prison system.
A couple of Thanksgivings later, we volunteered at a homeless

shelter, the one where she had donated the apron
and when she found it was no longer there, she got teary.

I asked why she was sad and she told me that she wasn’t sad,
that she never wanted to see me cry and that I would never

see her cry.  I asked why she would say such a thing
and she just went back to cooking like our life depended on it.