Immigrants’ Children

We cast aside soggy vegetables for clear, cold cream.
We cut our mouths on edges of plastic; we spit out
the thin, ink-worn pages
of your grandmother’s cookbook,
which crumble with the taste of age and sickness, like the mothballs
you are draped in
as you shuffle in the attic, keeping lighted
the dim stars of your history.

We dance
robed in folded rays of light, with
jewels blooming over our skin
in pus-filled beads of color;
the jewelry we wear for beauty
while we bear your native tongue like a choker.
We love
its certain je ne sais quoi.
We are to blame
for the crumbling clasp and cracks in the stone.

The city calls us to smoke and flames.
We watch with glowing eyes, seeing no darkness
as expensive cars crash, then burst
into fireworks.
There we lick our fingers, our tongues
rasping with iron and slick with oil.
We wave our neon dollars, yelling “God bless America.”

Reprinted by permission of Shift: A Journal of Literary Oddities, Copywright 2020 by Daniel Dykiel