American Immigration Ballad
Visa one Dependents three
As a tourist then to work
Twelve more years and the kids had grown
into proper English-speaking jerks
Parking tickets Lights left on
Didn’t even call their mother
Drug use Teen pregnancy
One married and divorced the summer
before turning twenty-seven
Just one degree between them
so when orders of removal came
they turned EXTRAmerican
They paid lawyers to make papers
One qualified for DACA
The other went to mosque and church
read Whitman Plath Baraka
Found poetry less opaque
than law Jaw aching pained
singing bodies electric
naked charged staking claims
Three kids US citizens all
The oldest would lament
Your honor I was just a boy
Not even a news event
Look at me It was simpler then
No fence No cage No war to flee
He practiced in the mirror
all night told the tale dutifully
The Therapy Intake Form Asks What I’m Afraid Of
I’m so afraid of anger
I’ll do anything to avoid it.
I’ll look past the belt
buckle in my father’s hand.
I‘m so yoked to a tragic pose.
This is not a running
kind of place. When I say
go, you can go, but this
is a no-go zone. The kids
need to know where they are
welcome. Here, in this place—
there, somewhere else—a felled
jiggling mass of reddish flesh.
A flush. A lash. A flurry
of weathered leather. A little blood
on the fin but still the bomb went in.
I don’t mean to offend, but
a suicide is a means to an end.
I think of death—my most-oft
posture as I imposter yet another
impossibly beneficent room.
Of this I‘m positive: I left
out the part where I kissed my son
like he’ll never see me again.