There isn’t a word in this country that wasn’t invented.

I remember this: keyboardside, spitting out school essays

on the carbon cycle with my blinded

grandfather. Blinded, to my English teacher’s

dismay, because someone did this. Verb,

antecedent; I was the product of a farmer’s son,

drafted to fight guerrilla until he couldn’t.

The walls of his heart now thicker than sugarcane.

The herbicides they sprayed in Filipino jungles,

tests for another shithole Asian venue of.

What feels free but isn’t. The rice that still grows

around houses fallowed for the rest of our lives. Vietnam,

Manchuria, Korea: noun, adjective. A teacher encouraged us to mine

our pasts for vocabulary. I cracked a dictionary and turned

to carpet-bombing.

I still get asked where I’m really from,

and the answer never satisfies. Why can’t a poem

be a protest. Just being here is war.