How to Assemble a (1) Native (2) Nippon (3) Cubana Body in (4) Appalachia 

there are four ways to name the century of dying in me what passions grew 
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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