America, I hear, as in American, American dream.
America—and a portion of the continent vanishes.
America: the name slips out my mouth
like a sticky cherry pit. America, I say again,
and this time I feel as if I’ve plucked
a geranium from Alejandra’s eyes,
the park in Trujillo, where we used to play hide-and-seek.
Years ago, I learned America was a word coined
centuries earlier by someone not from America,
after an Italian explorer who circled
the shadows of America’s earthen body, the earliest use
of America being almost ten thousand years after
la papa—the potato—was replanted
over and over and weaned off its venom
by hands often made invisible by America.
Reader, I can’t say America without noticing
its first button is in the wrong hole.
All day I move from one white space to another. / Today, ranked from whitest to least white: my classroom (as a teacher), my / classroom (as a student), my apartment, Kung Fu Tea. . . .
They came on ships, each of them, / everyone who was not born here, for centuries they, that is, we, came / here on ships. The ocean between worlds, empty for thousands of miles.
