Biracial
Third Place, National Poetry Competition, 2015
for my daughter
Some people stare, searching for a Judas bone, but all they can find are the stems of your arms, the sleek plunge of femur into socket.
These are the usual things, and why shouldn’t they be? You were not a provision of armistice or treaty. You were not born to be nation or diaspora.
The love that made you was simple as the sounds at breakfast: clink of pan on stove, scraping-back of chair. No slave ever rocked inside the boat of your hips, no explorer pried open an African river.
They say the ancestors reside in a sacred grove. Your homeland is wherever you stand. If the gaze lingers, it’s on your spine, straighter than the fence lines at Gettysburg.