Poetry
"Immigration" originally appeared in Crack The Spine and "Isolation" originally appeared in Emerge Literary Journal in slightly altered forms:
Immigration
Losses leave vacuums
siphoning mind from matter
in cavities of foreign dreams
deferred to domestic dust....
nerves drawling alphabets--
new languages to learn,
reciting dead names
of unrecorded children
mirrored in classrooms
ad libbing native dialects
which roll off the tongue
like tramontane landslides--
jagged Alps that Balkanize
the mouth of an executive
who hides behind the profane
wall of an alien reflection.
Isolation
They found my father weeping
at a stranger’s vacant doorstep.
He was searching for Piqua, Ohio,
only he was in Seattle, Washington.
I imagine the wrinkled lobes
of his brain cracking crystallized
shards that slide down his spine
like memories of a melted glacier.
If only I could slip into his mind
and watch his Mount Saint Helen
flatten into snow-dusted crops of Ohio,
where he roams in search of her alone.
Losses leave vacuums
siphoning mind from matter
in cavities of foreign dreams
deferred to domestic dust....
nerves drawling alphabets--
new languages to learn,
reciting dead names
of unrecorded children
mirrored in classrooms
ad libbing native dialects
which roll off the tongue
like tramontane landslides--
jagged Alps that Balkanize
the mouth of an executive
who hides behind the profane
wall of an alien reflection.
Isolation
They found my father weeping
at a stranger’s vacant doorstep.
He was searching for Piqua, Ohio,
only he was in Seattle, Washington.
I imagine the wrinkled lobes
of his brain cracking crystallized
shards that slide down his spine
like memories of a melted glacier.
If only I could slip into his mind
and watch his Mount Saint Helen
flatten into snow-dusted crops of Ohio,
where he roams in search of her alone.
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