“Thumb over the halo-halo layers ghostly over the seated pink mini” and “I will tell an old story of my name”
He showed me that our people’s history
is part of the American story
REPEAT: you stay up memorizing all the twists and turns of a ‘proper’ / enunciation and still your tongue fails you the morning after, syllables / flopping in your mouth like a dead fish, cleaved in shame.
& on the drive to LAX /when I ask you not to cry this time, you look / at me with reverence as if to say, what came from me / is so much more than I am
Older now, the sparrow God / gave my grandmother in place /of succulence.
Our Lady of Scapulars, we carry you around / like credentials, like disgrace, we suffer
this insufferable heat and your packaged spirit’s / smothered by the reek of our sweat—how much closer / must we be?
He showed me that our people’s history
is part of the American story
REPEAT: you stay up memorizing all the twists and turns of a ‘proper’ / enunciation and still your tongue fails you the morning after, syllables / flopping in your mouth like a dead fish, cleaved in shame.
Our Lady of Scapulars, we carry you around / like credentials, like disgrace, we suffer
this insufferable heat and your packaged spirit’s / smothered by the reek of our sweat—how much closer / must we be?
& on the drive to LAX /when I ask you not to cry this time, you look / at me with reverence as if to say, what came from me / is so much more than I am
Older now, the sparrow God / gave my grandmother in place /of succulence.
