Documents (New Poets of America, 42) [Paperback] Gray, Jan-Henry and Powell, D. A.

“As a Filipino-American conscious of his multiple identities and the trove of experiences and external forces that shaped him, Gray uses the unfettered landscape of poetry to release himself and others from the limitations that aggrieve undocumented immigrants.” —New City Lit

Rooted in the experience of living in America as a queer undocumented Filipino, Documents maps the byzantine journey toward citizenship through legal records and fragmented recollections. In poems that repurpose the forms and procedures central to an immigrant’s experiences—birth certificates, identification cards, letters, and interviews—Jan-Henry Gray reveals the narrative limits of legal documentation while simultaneously embracing the intersections of identity, desire, heritage, love, and a new imagining of freedom.

XXX-XX-0142

momma takes aim. leans into the machine. types
my first social security card. her third try. early,
I learn how to lie on forms.

Across the Pacific Ocean

*
To stand still
is to sink in sand.

*
Swim past the buoy where the guard can’t see.

*
In the photograph that you show me every holiday
we have the same conversation about
eating guavas on the beach, the black sand, and
when when when I will go back.

*
Painted blue and slate and
white from corner to corner,
the ocean extends past
the canvas edge. I hang
it backwards to see
the art behind the art.

*
At the ruins of the Sutro Baths.
100 years ago, people met
there and nowhere else.

*
It was here
where we learned how
to be naked around other bodies.

*
At dawn, gulls command and will the day.
Then, the machinery of the city—
its beaming commerce burns off all fog.
The ocean brings it back. She cannot sleep.

*
August 16, 2013:
One kilometer from your
port of call, two ships collide
in the middle of the night.
The hull of the ferry Thomas Aquinas
is now a mouthless whale.
Children slept in her belly.
And there were others…

*
How do you weigh an ocean?

*
I have no poems for the Atlantic.
Or New York. Or Europe either.
I look westward:
from home to home.

*
On the plane, I ate cubed fruit from a plastic cup.
I drank true milk. I looked out the window
learned to pronounce my names
and how to spell them.

*
The only way to know a song is to sing it.
The only way to know the ocean is to swim it.

*
I cannot wait any longer for the tides to rise to me.

Maid Poem #2

We were shown how to eat with our hands, how to pick the meat between bones, how to feel
for the small slivers hidden in fish, how to gather food with four fingers and push it into our
mouths with our thumbs.

There were no knives at our table, those were kept in the back kitchen, with the maids. They
ate when we ate. They stayed back when we went to church, to tend to the chickens, to care
for the youngest, always sick.

We knew their names, the smell of their skin. Shame I can’t name them now. My mother
remembers them all and each, which maid was paired with which child and which one (only
one) would come with us when we went to the mountain to ride horses in the fog.

Crush, Supermarket, California

It’s easy to
fall in love
with the
grocery store boys—
the one with the
tiny coffee cup
sweatshirt, too-tight
pants & cotton shoes or
the impossibly pale
fish boy who smiles
when he says I’m
from Alaska. Your
heart swelled,
stupid &
dreaming
of a boat
in artic
waters,
stars,
dots
that
dot the
ocean floor, you
will read
him poems & he
will explain the code
in the constellation
until morning
waking together,
hunting for
no fish, sailing
as you two do,
parallel
only to
each other,
listening to ice
melt
back
to water.