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.