Step 7: Be Unlucky.

Step 7: Be Unlucky.

7 is a lucky number.

The Newborn Buddha takes seven steps. 

Buy a small ceramic vase with a lucky bamboo plant at a street fair for your college dorm. Live a few months. It dies. For your second apartment, buy a lucky bamboo plant at the hipster corner shop. Live a few months. It dies. For your first real home, buy a lucky bamboo plant at the independent plant store. Live a few months. It dies.

Feel terrible about yourself for years. Think about how bamboo can survive everywhere, anywhere, except in your care. Convince yourself you are not allowed to care for living things.

Then, one day, try to be better.

Google these stupid little plants for your stupid little hands to take care of. Learn that what you have been buying all these years is a plant called Dracaena sanderiana. Sold as “lucky bamboo.” But this is not bamboo. Just a mimicry plant that people mistake for the real thing all the time.

POEM SERIES: How to be Hapa in 10 Easy Steps or Less!

PUBLISHED IN THE FALL 2021 ISSUE OF CALL ME [ BRACKETS ]

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