When I hear ‘migration,’ I think of ships
By Christian Hanz Lozada
chopping through tides and promise.
My coworker says, “I mean, I’m white,
so, implicit bias much? We have no story,”
referring to her kid’s project asking
about how the family’s migration
was affected by World War 2 and the Cold War.
She says, “I understand I can’t say anything,
but we’ve been American since the 18th century,
so there’s been no migration.”
In my head I have solutions: Has your family moved
from state to state, like the Japanese Americans pulled
from their homes or the African Americans moving
to fill a Japanese American-sized void to work factories
and shipyards? Has your family migrated from economy
to economy, like the migration from planting and picking
to packing and making? Has your family never had to run,
never had that nothing-holding-us-here, never had that
nothing-to-stake-a-future-on, always the absence
of the absence? Maybe write about your migration,
after the ship, when you carried the sword and the gun,
the whip and the blankets. Maybe write about the bow-wave
your presence creates, even when the ship doesn’t move.
Maybe write about the unintended migrations that happen
as your presence displaces everything around it.
Christian Hanz Lozada aspires to be like a cat, a creature that doesn’t care about the subtleties of others and who will, given time and circumstance, eat their owner. He authored the poetry collection He’s a Color, Until He’s Not and co-authored Leave with More Than You Came With. His Pushcart Prize nominated poetry has appeared in journals from California to Australia with stops in Hawaii, Korea, and the United Kingdom. Christian has featured at the Autry Museum and Beyond Baroque. He lives in San Pedro, CA and uses his MFA to teach his neighbors and their kids at Los Angeles Harbor College.
Photo credit: Dennis Jarvis via a Creative Commons license.
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