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.
