[Beneath dark purples, new life jockeying through the cracks]
       

Beneath dark purples, new life jockeying through the cracks. "It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood...Won't you be my neighbor?" Sexmoans & rabbit skulls. "Build the wall!" Harmonic sighs of ocean oscillations. (Percussive distance.) Immigrant offspring, my family. An American version of disembodied, we failed to root. Pineapples dream they eat an ice cream sandwich. In the mammogram, a black star fist. Love's only as real as the ancestors passing through us. Outside, the sky does miraculous things to the trees. I never wanted my mother's living much further from my own. Imagine surrender. Imagine Kevin self-bleaching his soul just to smooth in. Flattened with a baking pin. Zeroed down to flour. Of course it hurt, still hurts. Us vs. them, there vs. here, a contiguity of angles to unlearn.

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Copyright © 2020 Kevin Phan All rights reserved
from Black Warrior Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission