95 Immigration poems

There was another life of cool summer mornings, the dogwood air and the slag stink so gray like our monsoon which we loved for the rain and cool wind until the rot came into us. And I remember the boys we were the evening of our departure, our mothers waving through the train’s black pluming exhaust; they were not proud in their tears of our leaving, so don’t tell me to shut up about the war or I might pull something from my head, from my head, from my head that you wouldn’t want to see and whoever the people are might be offended. From the green country you reconstruct in your brain, from the rubble and stink of your occupation, there is no moving out. A sweet boy who got drunk and brave on our long ride into the State draws a maze every day on white paper, precisely in his room of years as if you could walk into it. All day he draws and imagines his platoon will return from the burning river where he sent them sixteen years ago into fire. He can’t stop seeing the line of trees explode in white phosphorous blossoms and the liftship sent for them spinning uncontrollably beyond hope into the Citadel wall. Only his mother comes these days, drying the fruit in her apron or singing the cup of hot tea into his fingers which, like barbed wire, web the air.

I have the papers now they're in a drawer i know exactly where i look at them sometimes not to check they're real just to confirm the fact of them

My father waited years for a form for an answer to a form my family is from here and not from here both things are true the border has opinions my father doesn't

my grandmother crossed a border with two children and a bag and became the beginning of something i carry that with me like a compass

I have two countries now and belong to both and neither which is a specific kind of loneliness that has a specific kind of beauty to it too