 Hi my name is Jaira Dang and I am a poet and journalist born and raised in the St. Gabriel Valley and I am currently living in the city of Long Beach. With the prompt our voices I was thinking about language and the ways in which words cannot describe what we are always feeling or experiencing in specific moments. And in the poems that I'm about to share with you the first poem is about me and my nai nai, my grandmother, and the lack of language that exists between us because I have lost access to my first language, Mandarin, as I'm talking to her before we eat dinner. And the second poem is about the way that language can both be freeing and trapping. This first poem is untitled. When Bawa steps away from the table, nai nai asks me if I have a boyfriend. I don't know the Chinese word for lesbian so instead I say I don't like boys. She laughs, says, I also think boys are gross. I want to tell her a dream of a wife to marry to have children with. At night I think of soft hands and unstubbled faces pressed against bedsheets. My nai nai's country is the only ancestral land that will accept this redundant desire in me. Some days I wake up with a belly full of longing for the street markets, hooked raw meat touching open air, boba and swabbing of stacked gray houses that are allowed to age with protective zoning laws. I imagine going old there, cradled by the Pacific, sitting in the rift of fault lines, towering mountains I want to tell her. My love for land and culture sits with my fear but all I do is laugh and nod my head. This second poem is titled, an algorithm matches me with a nice girl and I tell her. I have always been grasping for words like when my mother phones customer service dressed in her best American accent TM. I was part of a music program, giving Bach, she pronounced it bark. Isn't that what is asked of us? Heal and sit, repeat.