Christian Hanz Lozada
An Empty Wine Glass and a Clump of Hair in an Oakland Gutter
sit outside my hotel, away from the other Asians—
teachers and administrators and students not to mention
Chinatown a couple blocks over. Sometimes you need
space from your own to miss the people lost to dropouts
and graduations, to the military and death, to cancer
and death. The opposite of Ireland is Guam;
the opposite of St. Patrick and snake eviction
is the U.S. Navy and the Brown Tree Snake;
When your hunger has eaten the last of the living,
long after the texture touched your tongue,
you will at least have municipal plaques, murals, and zoos
to say their names. At Shandong, a Chinese restaurant
surrounded by BLMgraffiti muralspleas, the gray-haired
and thin dumpling cook, thick-knuckled hands covered
in flour, nooks on a stool under her station of boiling pots.
Her eyes, far away, see nothing, but her mouth hangs open
and silent, not gasping but doing a bit more work than breathing.
She both waits and dreads the next order and the hot-water
splash she doesn’t feel anymore rhythmed to the slow throb
in her feet more consistent than business. This is not
a land acknowledgement, thanking the native stewards
for this space because it’s not the land that offers
opportunity, it’s the blood and the bone,
and not always yours.
A World Without Elders
The insides of a duck egg lie splashed across the thoroughfare
with a stick next to and through the shattered shell. The dark yellow
yoke tells me it was a wild baby that never happened, the stick
says some kid found life early. I can see the mother staying
in the nest, sitting on a bit of hope, still.
My hand grasps and relaxes while I follow the shadows
and the sun and watch video after video, trying to learn
how to prune banana trees from a world-away aunty
like youtube is the elder out in the field for us now
that we are so far removed from the dirt. That bit of gray
under your nail’s crescents is no longer soil,
it’s just what remains from clawing skin.
I want so much to see cotton grow, to pick it, and to feel
the dried leaves cut my cuticles. I posted this on social media:
“all sins shall be forgiven when I return to my homeland
by the sea.” I don’t remember who said it, but I know
the truth when I see it. Posting quotes without giving credit
is asking people to see me as cool or do research to know I am.
To Build on the Old One
My friend’s services are held at Mary Star of the Sea,
just down the hill from my house on the way to the port.
Inside, a marbled Mary cradles a schooner and towers
over crucifixes and the father, who booms envy
when comparing us mourners to this past Sunday’s mass
while sprinkling the homily with ocean and harbor
metaphors. I think of the chapel in Moby Dick
with its pulpit that looks like the bow of a ship
and a sermon filled with leviathans and Jonahs to scare
the seafaring community into belief. The priest, here,
talks about giving communion to “this Chinese kid,
an atheist and communist” who found God by counting
infinity. Even in grief, I want no part of this missionizing
but I stay, hoping something takes this burden from off
my shoulders or at least to be surrounded by survivors
pinned by the same weight. As the priest goes on,
speaking nothing to our loss but everything to his,
I imagine a new church, built on the old one. I imagine
the pews all angled and facing the door, the entirety
of the mass is each congregant entering and announcing
I am____________, filling the gap with the identity
most vulnerable or centered in that moment; and after
each I am____________, we all say I see you___________.
I see you, I see you, I see you.
Craft Essay
I feel I came to poetry late and I don’t have enough time to find poets I can learn from, so I only read poetry. Every collection has notes on moves that I like or want to avoid. I use a color system for pieces that have been published, that inspire, or are teachable. I have an ongoing list of details, ideas, and lines that I write throughout the day. I’m pretty sure my phone is a petri dish of gross because I will stop whatever I’m doing for an idea. I can be cleaning a chicken coop, riding my bike to work, or building furniture.
Every morning, I use that list to expand an idea or combine unrelated things, like in the poem “A World Without Elders.” I had notes about the broken duck egg and wanting an elder to garden with. That day, I made the connection between generational changes and parenting. This process happens a lot with my travel poems. They start as details that I piece together to capture a sense of place, like “An Empty Wine Glass,” which has the experience of walking around and memory. The cook was everything, but Ireland and Guam had haunted me for months. Some poems I write in my head as I’m experiencing them like “To Build on the Old One,” probably to disassociate from my feelings.
While I write I mentally use a rubric. I want a poem with an impactful and grounding opening, physical action and heart, literary play and a dramatic turn, and a resounding ending. The rubric isn’t a formula, more a reminder of the things I value.
To keep my work approachable, I send a 6am poem to my two readers: Steve, my writing partner for decades, and Lessa, my spouse and queen of the librarians. The themes my poems revisit, like grief and place, generational/cultural knowledge, and mixed-race experience, are issues that resonate for them. Steve’s the father of mixed-race kids and grounds his writing in place. Lessa’s mixed-race and lives away from her ancestral homeland, Hawaii.
After the poem is written, it sits before being graded according to each element in the rubric to revise intentionally. If the poem still doesn’t work, I let it sit again or cannibalize it. Hopefully, I can learn new skills to rebuild it.
Ironically, the more I‘ve changed as a writer, the more I become entrenched in a lineage I bristled against. My writing is influenced by Long Beach, California poetry. The major branch is Gerald Locklin who taught generations of writers at California State University to try to find beauty or irony in small moments. I wanted to be more Sherman Alexie than Charles Bukowski, but Locklin read the younger me like a book when I was anti-Long Beach and anti-poetry. While I was focused on writing epic novels, he told me that sometimes all we have time to write is a poem, a short one. He was right, and I keep becoming me.
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 wrote the poetry collection He’s a Color, Until He’s Not. His Pushcart Prize nominated poetry has appeared in journals from five continents and over 60 journals, magazines, and anthologies. 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.
Banner Art:
from Abstract Watercolor, Jay Meuser, 1950’s
