Immigrants

Your immigrant grandmother

sipped the bones

                   of shorelines,

                       kneaded their 

splinters

into a faith

built on

a freak of nature.

Your immigrant grandfather

rejected legislated fun-bags,

plastic trees

and disaster relief,

yelled his mangled un-responses

in groves of goatees

                                 and Cadillacs.

Your immigrant uncle

          wore a belly full of corn syrup,

slid off 

his skin junkie’s charisma

into a Brownstone bowl

and buried it

with soft-boiled consequences.

Your immigrant mother

licked the cigarette’s copper coil,

           synchronized her lungs’ waste.

Beneath the branches

of a fire escape,

her breast curved

like a pomegranate.

Your immigrant brother

sees the reflective lights

of the helicopter’s ugly

bubble cockpit,

knows that

within certain limits,

the Moon is as imitated 

as a cop's fist.

My immigrant fingers

   hide behind a 

swelling glass abscess

                   

and next week’s podcast,

afraid to touch

this city

through an astronaut’s suit.