"Energy in Motion II" (2016), by Ezequiel Jimenez from Wikimedia Commons
Of What America
By Benjamin Naka-Hasebe Kingsley
How to Assemble a (1) Native (2) Nippon (3) Cubana Body in (4) Appalachia
family gathers children’s ringing sand splash toys tangled in teenage lust
the skin consciousness potential of everyone eyeing one another
in sunbursted bottoms there is nothing here but the bliss of this day
& so I think on death hanging out over the Atlantic so many dead
watashi kazoku
kwaji’ya’
my kinfolk
a mixed-mixed-skinned boy who would plant his body here & witness
a happy beach rooted in the smile of so much untilled history somewhere
the open ocean ferried my padre between Cuba & Miami swam pescado
inside each swell of lung unmoored he said until his mind fell into love
with the woman who fled America’s internment camps a pregnant Nippon
daughter’s flight from San Diego to a Carolina quarry tegami kaku yo
I’ll write you letters she touched the shovel-shaped incisors of a Native
American boy whose floorboards were still booting the reeducation each hode’noda’
song of de facto fathers my Onondaga origin bowed beneath the whip
of whiteness lashed he laid down love for my kin who ran skinny rail
lines what split Appalachian silt & marl my feet saddle all the loosed
mud of so many continents where everyone is gone somedays & somedays
they aren’t because I believe on days like this with a mouthful of expiring
sun the potential of a small beginning what sustains a soul across imagined borders
what finds tortured bodies their song of forward rejoicing.
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