Aloha Airlines Ticket
In the pouch of Papa’s camera,
I find carbon copied airline tickets
with just his kids’ names on them,
and I remember seeing a sepia picture
of three skinny brown children,
churched up for the flight, squeezed
into starched clothes and framed
with boxy, proportional suitcases
at their feet. Their smiles hide
the complexity of air travel
and existence without supervision,
not to mention the transition between
the diasporic Hawaiian familiar here
to the foreign ancestral homeland there,
between land more settled and still
being colonized, between leaving
home and visiting home-taken.
Traveling without a guardian
comes in two forms: privilege
or the need for some part of you
to survive.
Christian Hanz Lozada 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 their owner. He wrote the poetry collection He’s a Color, Until He’s Not. His Pushcart Prize nominated poetry has appeared in journals from five continents and counting. 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.
