There's a Reason No One Will Watch My Movie

By Christian Hanz Lozada

Blinded by the Light is a movie about an Asian kid
trying to blend family culture with Britain,
wanting to become a writer, loving a white girl,
and like cheesy teen movies, it ends with a speech
in front of the whole school! His stern Asian father
stands in the back listening for the first time, seeing
his son as a person. These things don’t happen
but make cinematic sense.
 
When I had that moment, standing in front of a room
full of people there for me (not entirely me, but I was invited),
reading my poetry, loving my parents, my wife,
and my former white girlfriends, my stern Asian father
left the room. Now, he leaves all the rooms
and my siblings and mom look at me for a second
before acting like everything is fine. He leaves
all the rooms, not just the ones we share, but
 
all the rooms I enter, all the rooms where he has been,
all the rooms I have earned, and now, all the rooms I have lost.
Even with CGI, it’s hard to show that kind of absence.

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Heaven's Gonna Be Split Too, You Know

By Christian Hanz Lozada

Heaven looks like the reward for working days and nights, for exchanging happiness
and hours for a couple bucks to pay a kid’s
expensive school or White Grandma’s
​medication.
 
Heaven looks like the peace that comes after
abstaining from the wrong kinds of sex and the rage from feeling left out.
 
Heaven is the place on our tongues that
​builds one world and hobbles the other.

Heaven looks like the reward for working
days and nights, for exchanging happiness
and hours for a couple seconds where you
eat those teacher’s words or the not-right
paperwork.
 
Heaven looks like the peace that comes after
your love is deemed wrong with the
creativity of laws and generations.
 
Heaven is the place on our tongues that
​holds should-be world whispers.

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To Have a Filipino Last Name

By Christian Hanz Lozada

While staying in a Waikiki hotel,
in Nani’s ancestral homeland,
the parking cashier asks, “Ma’am,
is your last name Pilipino?”
 
Nani replies, “Yes,” and thinks
about her great grandfather saving
money from sugar plantations
to buy a taxicab and court
 
the large Brown woman
bouncing the bars at night,
then saving to raise their kids
with neither Hawaiian nor Filipino
 
tongues. “So do you speak
Pilipino?” Nani thinks about
how Filipinx presidents need
translators to tour the islands
 
for all the tongues they don’t know
minus one more that she doesn’t.
She replies to this settler/cousin, “No.”
The trespasser/family responds,
 
“Then you’re not Pilipino.”

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History Tests are Manufacturing Consent

By Christian Hanz Lozada

The question on the History test is simple:
Sally Hemings was Thomas Jefferson’s ___________
             a) Slave
            b) Mistress
            c) Both 

The answer is a choice between passing
and being right. You can select the one
the teacher wants, act like the good student,
the one that reads the books, does the work,
learns. One of the good ones. You can select
 
the right answer: a slave does not have a choice.
The secret quarters attached to Jefferson’s bedroom
was the sight of regular, systematic violations.
The question and the choices are a threat:
You can be right, but the cost is acting
 
like a bad student, the kind that never
bought the book, doesn’t do the work,
can’t learn. One of the bad ones.
So the choice is simple:
pass or pass or pass.

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Compulsive Behind the Wheel

By Christian Hanz Lozada

Every freeway is a breakdown
where teenage me with a broken leg
and White Mom get in the back
of a stranger’s car. He’s just helping.
 
Every road, when it rains, is a water wall
lifting White Grandma’s car, tenderly,
off its wheels long enough to fill with water.
She still can’t swim and now can’t drive.
 
Every commute is a race away and toward
rest. It’s biting the web between index and thumb,
hoping pain can keep my eyes open enough
to see that I’m still between the lines.
 
Every night road is filled with black,
perpendicular cars that White Brother
doesn’t see. I wonder if he was hand-biting
when he killed the passed-out driver.
 
Every car I enter is filled with ghosts saying:
only one destination is guaranteed, so I bump
the music loud and make it rain fast food wrappers
with contents that pad my heart and keep it racing.

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​Christian Hanz Lozada (he/him) aspires to be like a cat, a creature that doesn’t care about the subtleties of others and who will, given time and circumstance, eat its owner. He authored the poetry collection He’s a Color, Until He’s Not and co-authored Leave with More Than You Came With. His poems have appeared in journals from California to Australia with stops in Hawaii, Korea, and the United Kingdom. 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.