How to Assemble a (1) Native (2) Nippon (3) Cubana Body in (4) Appalachia?
family gathers children’s ringing sand splash toys tangled in teenage lust?
the skin consciousness potential of everyone eyeing one another?
in sunbursted bottoms there is nothing here but the bliss of this day?
& so I think on death hanging out over the Atlantic so many dead
watashi kazoku?
kwaji’ya’?
my kinfolk
a mixed-mixed-skinned boy who would plant his body here & witness??
a happy beach rooted in the smile of so much untilled history somewhere?
the open ocean ferried my padre between Cuba & Miami swam pescado?
inside each swell of lung unmoored he said until his mind?fell into love?
with the woman who fled America’s internment camps a pregnant Nippon?
daughter’s flight from San Diego to a Carolina quarry tegami kaku yo?
I’ll write you letters?she touched the shovel-shaped incisors of a Native?
American boy whose floorboards were still booting the reeducation each hode’noda’?
song of de facto fathers my Onondaga origin bowed beneath the whip?
of whiteness lashed he laid down love for my kin who ran skinny rail?
lines what split Appalachian silt & marl my feet saddle all the loosed?
mud of so many continents where everyone is gone somedays & somedays?
they aren’t because I believe on days like this with a mouthful of expiring?
sun the potential of a small beginning what sustains a soul across imagined borders?
what finds tortured bodies their song of forward rejoicing.?
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