This body is a bridge, amber-colored and entombed, where the desert and sea converge into the same flesh, press tongue to soul and sunlight and hope to hold both.
Yes, I look like my mother. In pictures, our laughter beams side-by-side, noses scrunched, heads thrown back, carrying that subdued painful joy.
The shape of my eyes carries only half of the story — when you trail your fingers along my hips, the ridges that live there exist only because this skin outstretched toward morning to hold the rest.
My father and I are both born of sea salt, bodies small in the undertow of drowned universes, riptide friction, shins and shoulders spilling red onto cliff sides, sand-scraped and sore with wonder.
In sleep, they arrive by way of red strings and barbed wire, stories which lived and died for mine to exist, voices ringing in foreign tongues and broken english, ankles torn through by those borders crossed and kissed.
Sisoguichi dances under my grandmother’s tongue when she measures salt in puños, switches to Spanish mid-sentence, tells me Don’t ever take a shortcut for the sure way.
In waking, there is an absence in my bones, something cold and breaking under confused skin and marbled muscle, this body nothing but a vessel full of words unspoken.
Often, I imagine my family who vanished to ash beneath a cloud shaped like a champagne cork, their shadows burnt into walls, their eyes white beneath the light of a nation smiling on the other side.
My coworker tells me race-mixing is wrong. I mean — obviously people can love whoever they want. I would just never do that. Yes. I threw a fuss. Yes. I watched her get employee of the month sometime later.
Work runs through my blood from opposite sides of the Pacific, hands which worked farms and built houses in rising deserts, fingers caught in fishing nets and metal hooks over falling seas, fill me — make me.
José walked through Mexico deserts and arrived in El Paso, TX — and this is where we enter, legacy built from sand upward into blue skies, fresh flour tortillas sitting at the table, the wooden rolling pin, a song.
Mixed genetics does not allow for duplicates — our family mismatched and dissimilar, dark, pale, darkish, darker, I’d never have guessed she was your sister. Me neither.
My parents met the way June meets July: opposite and inevitable, easily and all at once, forgetting where one ended and the other began, a sun rising eternally on and on and on and on.
Nao and her three children walked onto the trains with boarded windows to arrive in Gila Rivers, AZ — and this is where we enter, legacy built from sand upward into blue skies, moth orchids face east, tongues slit.
You tell me you love how I smile with my whole face — eyes closed, relishing in the joy of simplicities like sunshine and pressed coffee and a world broken under bleeding gums and swollen tear ducts.
I used to watch her watch herself in the mirror, used to watch her watch her white friends with long, slender legs and violet veins coursing the thin skin over their eyelids, watch her watch her life be disappointing.
The question burns through the stomach lining, Is that your real name or the American version of your real name? I was named after Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and I’ve never met a knife sharper than my own teeth.
I remember the pitchforks in the sea at three am, our knees wet with the tide, reaching into the sand and holding clams, the bucket filled with reward, our bellies full by nightfall, our hands clutch the knife and slice.
When my sister tried to enter our hospital room, the nurses stopped her and said that wasn’t her family in that room. Her tears could break that word “family” in half, could fill up her lungs, stop her breath again, again.
It is easy to say we exist in the in-between — exist in that blue ring that persists in your vision after glancing at the sun, disappears from you, fades to the background until your eyes fall upon morning again.
I have lived my entirety explaining myself to people like you — people who marvel at our flesh, who tell me how strange I am to carry two worlds so opposite of each other. No one knows hands can touch over oceans.
People will ask if I speak either language — how to say it takes only three generations for a language to be lost or maybe how to say forced assimilation does not allow for the preservation of language in immigrant families.
The sea here is too cold — so I lie in the bathtub until my fingers prune, this flesh transforming to suit the surroundings, a white bathroom, a brown body, a flame snuffed, a song inaudible beneath the surface.
When I say our tongues were stripped from us, I mean my grandfather refuses to use his Japanese name.
When I say our tongues were stripped from us, I mean my grandmother goes by Minnie — not Ascencion.
Sometimes, sunlight looks like water — like all the ways I’ve reached toward a hand and retreated, all the ways I’ve slipped away from beneath your feet, left emptiness there in the sand where you forgot to look for me.
Chosen family means my first language was Hawaiian Pidgin, love infused in trailed vowels and joy breaking across water I refused to leave, pomegranates shining under California sun, orchids tucked behind brown ears.
The boy I’m on a first-and-only date with tries to explain what pozole is to me. I try to come up with all the ways to say I’m Mexican.
When you ask about my family, there’s no easy way to start — our story branches and braids, red strings entangled to form this flesh. The mouth cannot hold this sea without drowning.
It is easy to excuse racism towards Asians because there is no punishment. It is easy to break skin with a tongue sharpened on chile pequin, easy to leave them speechless with a mouth filled with grated ginger.
Ghosts rest themselves beneath my mother’s eyes, kiss her awake each morning with the sun, lay her to rest each night with the shadows — they dance here, a charm, a greeting, a love note from worlds before us.
We are walking a tightrope — to understand is to break open the ribcage, remove the lungs and watch them expand, watch the drowning of a solar storm contained only by bone, spider-cracked and cold.
During New Years, we feast — mochi fills the mouth, soba seeks a tempura companion, a prime rib roasted and resting, chilaquiles pulled from the oven, ozoni begs for another good year, under hashi, spoon, salt, sun.
The body tells only one story — the one you meet and refuse to know, the burial, the fracture, the song, the sun, the fire snuffed, the handful of ocean you lost in your palms, the world you forget, the love in-between.