I am an unearthed possibility.

a ragged portrait of parents’ youth.

streaked chestnut with mother’s hair and red with father’s politics.

I am a homemade surprise of surmised, enterprising, equitable talents.

It’s like inertia, and you my charging force, a Morse code of predetermined race and class. A farce.

a citizenship inebriation.

Ragged portraits have consequences so I am almost ESL, but hell, so are we.

a happy collateral

our intent unilateral, channelled, fanatical

into a lifetime host

boasting a grandfather’s watery eyes that’s

the apex of nothing. I am in love with manual cartography.

And absolved of tension,

dissolved itself in two parts (“but where are you from originally?”), but a heart’s

lungs mapped with hospital charts

can coexist and one day

breathe alone

our squinting venture into parenthood.

we leave behind a person, its composite parts, so

dreams are tamed,

our flags, inflamed,

return a final time:

the damp earth from whence we came.