The Experience Wasn't Lost but the Takeaway Was Wrong

By Christian Hanz Lozada

​Eighteen in the Philippines,
a San Miguel beer, fried eggs, rice,
and sausage for every breakfast.
My cousin came home as I woke up,
and we visited in that McDonald’s-like
golden hour between breakfast and lunch
where all parts of the menu are possible.
 
Standing next to us as we ate
was the cook and the fanner of flies.
I never knew her name,
but the hormones in me loved her
and that blank, boredom gaze
lazily waving a fan over the food.
 
I never learned her name
and never asked for her service,
but she had the meal ready.
I ate even though I wasn’t hungry,
I drank hating beer, I wanted to go home
so the love of my life (at 18 I labeled
57 loves of my life) wouldn’t stand there
 
with her clean white t-shirt, thin
with dark skin and thick hair
and my dreams of just talking.
Even now, she is faceless and nameless.
even now, like then, I am too cowardly
or polite to reach out, to check in, to help.
 
It’s not about love or objectification,
it’s about capitalism and success.
It’s about wanting to do something,
but still choosing to maintain.

---

Funny How We Can Build Things That Last When We Want To

By Christian Hanz Lozada

My Brown Dad would take vacation days at his job to cross picket lines at other hospitals
when the scab pay was too good to pass up.
 
Lucille Clifton’s father had worked in coal mines and in laboring camps throughout the South,
and had come North during the strike at a steel plant which hired him.
 
When working full time at a Veterans Affairs hospital, you could lose your job if they caught you
waged somewhere else, so on the weekends, when the phone rang, our father was sleeping.
 
In Florida, as I read Clifton, the TV says child labor laws are easing for teens
to work overnight and assembly lines and after, yawn all day, if they make it to school.
 
During contract negotiations, my White Brother tells his longshoreman:
35% of the port’s volume ain’t coming back and tells me they’re asking for too much.
 
Just down the street from my White Brother’s job, Carlos Bulosan did a stint,
standing shoulder to shoulder with Japanese, Mexicans, other Filipinos, and poor Whites,
 
hands cold, cutting fish at the canneries—now gone— 
on an island that didn’t exist 100 years ago. 

---

​Christian Hanz Lozada’s (he/him) near-accolades include two Pushcart and Best of the Net nominations, runner up in the Blossom Contest for BIPOC writers, and almost having dated Super Bowl halftime star Jessica Alba (if an initiated conversation counts). He wrote the poetry collection He’s a Color, Until He’s Not. His poetry has been published worldwide, including in Zocalo Public Square, Bamboo Ridge, and Emerson Review. 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.