an immigrant love letter
this is a love letter
to jasmine rice and soy sauce in the ethnic aisle to the crisp
melting of duck skin in my mouth you taste the way america was
supposed to taste to the ember traveling down our burnt
prayers leaving trails of incense ashes i sweep off the ancestral altar to the
ocean to water to passage to fish sauce if you boil it dry only salt
remains and i remain a remnant of the dry season heat the
smoke of a fresh gunshot to my father’s body — a rubber band
stretching where the ends don’t meet the space between one end and the other
is the span of an immigrant’s pride i am an immigrant’s pride
look at me i open my hands and i hold origin stories
in the motes of ash caught inside the lines on my palms i am made of
what is left behind in the heat they say the volcano decimates its
mountainside no living thing survives but at the first rain does the ash not run
fertile
