
For Immigrant Parents
Your father doesn’t appear
in poems because it’s
your mother’s hands that feed
hungry mouths, your mother bouncing babies
on one knee, nudging bedroom
doors closed with the other. This poem
is for your father. White hair
sprouts out as he lies on the couch, in a dream
where your dream pans out because
he lived between two households so your mother
could give you remnants of home in
the kitchen, as everything she touches
makes it all okay again. This poem is for your
mother, whose voice whispers like a qul
before you lock the door behind you. You sit
solidly between two bodies, your sisters, one
grown up too fast, the other still growing,
you somewhere in the middle. Life follows
patterns. Step into an immigrant house. Fathers
are absent because they need to be.