Christian Hanz Lozada
April 2024
Christian Hanz Lozada is the son of an immigrant Filipino and a descendant of the Southern Confederacy. He knows the shape of hope and exclusion. 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.
WHITE MATH
A weird, scraggly vine grows between sun-bleached rocks,
its leaves are small, a little larger than mustard seeds,
the stems are dry and brittle, showing just how little water
some need to grow, showing how nature is patient
enough to let you snap limbs while paying no mind.
My White Neighbor with white hair and a white t-shirt
passes by every day, shaking his head at the dry vines
growing between the gaps of my rock garden.
From a distance, about as far away as his house,
the vines look like drying moss that bloomed after a rain
but is now reddening and browning toward death.
He mad-dogs my front yard twice a day, walking his pet
and doing White calculus: another Brown person plus
the apartment buildings filled with X number
of Brown and Black bodies equals the 7% population
needed to trigger White flight. It takes less than a month
of me living in this house before the dude
has a realtor sign posted on his lawn. I read it as:
Enough is enough, the sunbaked soil is taking back
what is owed. Which is fine, he thinks,
nothing can grow here anymore,
anyway.
MAY LIFE IS BETTER WHEN
For years, we selfishly worried about our elders,
the ones who kept their Hawaiian tongues secret
when the state dictated them cut.
There were so few in the family, we fretted
none would be there to pluck a child’s name
from the world like picking flowers for lei—
a gift at a greeting—no matter
that Queen Lili’uokalani’s birth name
was picked for the sore eyes her elder suffered.
As time passed, our elders did, too,
and we joked about blindly stroking
alphabetical lists of Hawaiian baby names
or going pull Pilipino and selecting one
based upon joyful pops across taste buds,
words without context and removed
from meaning other than being unique
and just foreign enough for future butcherings.
Maybe our child won’t have a Hawaiian name,
we consoled ourselves, Papa didn’t, and he was
the doorway to culture by blood and knowledge.
Maybe Hawaiianess isn’t in a name but in the blood
and the heart, and maybe we don’t have enough
of either to have a child, and maybe we could have
named him Kavika because that sounds so much better
than simply David, and I never talk
to my cousin David anyway because
he’s an asshole. And maybe life is better
when you cut out the parts of you
you think are important, and maybe
life is better childless.