Poetry Issue #61
Breathing America
Brown Dad flooded the house with English;
it swept through the open front and back doors
and trickled in through drafty windowsills.
He stored it in the cabinets and refrigerator
to pour out in the face of want.
Sentences were broken: no English, no eat.
Brown Dad understood a human body, like fish,
absorbs its surroundings. He understood the math:
6 and 8 year-old boys should not be in kindergarten.
He understood the price of broken English is
a stack of final notices and treading water, you hope.
Brown Dad counted all the time:
a regular American income, multiple credit cards,
private school, ten fingers around a Cebuano’s neck,
4.4 pounds per square inch to choke it,
his weight, 220 pounds, to hold it down.
Thin throats crush easily
and there’s nothing thinner
than a voice in a flood.
Like fish, his kids breathed through their skin
till the difference between water and ocean was lost.
To breathe in these depths, my family exchanged
broken dialects for unaccented regrets.
Every Other Word Is Silence: A Broken Pantoum
If white is the absence color,
I’m half brown
and half nothing
build an identity with this
I’m half brown,
just enough to be passed over
for that date
a job
some happiness
build an identity with this
with the absence of love, stability, and joy
just brown enough to be passed over
for that date
a job
some happiness
filled with aspiration to pick up these pieces and build
with the absence of love, stability, and joy
create a vocabulary where every other word is silence
filled with aspiration to pick up these pieces and build
and half nothing
create a vocabulary where every other word is silence
if white is the absence of color
Bury It When You Land
White Mom doesn’t talk about migration.
When she tries, she punctuates with hopeful
doom scrolling her work email.
She tells me about coming to California,
about a working 13-year-old slapping
sandwich layers together during lunch rush,
about a secret account and hidden cash
in books, about saving for private school
just to distance from them,
her voice lowers: Blacks.
The story I want to hear, though,
the one I press and ply her with drinks for,
is the why: Why move here?
The story I want to hear—the one I rewrite
and revise questions to dig with like
uselessly sharpened shovel blades—
is the story of a fracturing family
hoping a continental shift would somehow
make them whole.
The story I want to hear,
the one she can’t tell because
there is no direct White translation
for the words is how:
“We were wrong.”
Brown Dad doesn’t talk about migration.
When he tries, he punctuates it in sudden
departures for car repair and swap meets.
He tells me about entering White countries
about working weeks for free to show his
ability only to be paid under the table.
About “Sure,” he’d say. “Pay what you can,
when you can.” About how he could count
“what he could earn,” but was silent
“when they didn’t pay.”
The story I want to hear, though,
the one he tells indirectly in chores,
is the why: Why migrate?
The story I want to hear—the one I ask
only in my head because all tongues
to him are cutting blades—
is the story of a man moving oceans away
with a family on his back, keeping them
together but not whole.
The story I want to hear,
the one he can’t tell because
like any muscle, the tongue needs exercise,
and his doesn’t move is how: “I had enough
strength to carry only us.”
Escape Is a Cradle to Grave Profession
Brown Dad has a bug-out bag,
it’s a briefcase he’s carried
around from town to town
from country to country
his little black box,
the thing you need after the disaster.
In this box is all the things that count:
birth certificates, passports, citizenships, deeds,
a document for every important passage
and he has two of each. He told me, once,
I had another brother, you see, stillborn.
I took his birth certificate and built a life.
I asked “why?” And he answers:
You never know, but he tells me
so much about himself in the parts
that I do know: he is the kind of person
that might need a new identity
with behavior bordering on a shunning
if not the town’s torches and pitchforks.
He’s never needed it, but I know why
he keeps it: there is no room he enters
that doesn’t feel a second from stifling,
no job he takes that doesn’t feel crushing,
no relationship he has that doesn’t feel
close to tragic. He needs the bag
just to feel safe enough to live
and love in his own way.
Evergreen Bowling Lanes
Construction paper cutouts
red, orange, and yellow leaves
taped to the wall, signaling fall
in ways that California’s trees don’t.
The walls are painted with Tiki images
and large green bamboo,
all decked out as paradise:
paradise in fall,
paradise in a bowling alley.
The competition was glossy and LCDs.
Here, it was projectors and handwriting,
some paint, and schizophrenic paradises:
mid-90s paradise rockabilly,
late-90s paradise streaked with red,
celebrating laser tag next door,
but always underneath and returning:
grass huts, hula girls, and surfers.
Here is a struggle to be identified,
different from your expectations,
a declaration: “You cannot know
me from how I look.”
The competition,
clean and automated,
always wins.
The bulldozers come
pushing, crunching,
breaking the evergreen
paint underneath.
They don’t have to know you
to destroy you.
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