The next poem is a passport photo asks me two by two myself
and capture what I am in neutral.
And I recall I have yet to see the chambers of my heart turn
tusk.
A passport photo should be mailed
to the federal government with my birth certificate,
and I wonder if they will return.
Consider the power of printed paper.
Asks me daily, am I Brown?
Am I white?
Am I?
I am.
Am I?
I am.
I wonder when the trends transitions.
Two by two myself a neat shape raises no questions
and tells you no lies.
Capture what I am in neutral.
I have yet to see a sunrise in the shadow or a child birth
itself from the inside of a Joshua tree.
And this does not mean it is not possible.
The chamber of my heart is a quiet, quiet.
The outside of a pulse driving into fire.
Turn tusk, turn dusk, turn day, turn lingua, turn lingua,
turn franca, turn español, turn sombra, así, atrás, allí,
acá, to here, yes, here, yes, here, it is dark.
Looks at me how Teddy Roosevelt died coveting a white buffalo.
Looks at me as a mirror, and a mirror
has no voice in the exchange.
How I find my grandpa's alien registration
card in a box of tools, the things required.
Teddy Roosevelt was drawn by Martín Ramírez,
or so I have now invented.
The Red Rider, frenzy eyed and bullet fashioned,
may in fact leap from a horse that will buck him off first.
Teddy is not in a manner of mirrors
inside a force of cartography.
He is going West.
He will be institutionalized, tuberculosis and schizophrenia.
He will not not be President.
Martín has conjured a labyrinth.
He walks through, Teddy stays.
Died is a static word used by people
to tell others a movement or a person is finally gone.
What if I write?
I breathed in the air of my grandma
the moment she became atomic.
What if I write outside of what the human eye can see?
The atomic is infinite.
What if I write a border can be built or raised,
but never atomic?