Christian Hanz Lozada

Blood Quantum Is Damages Due and Damages Paid

“To most Americans, then, Hawai’i is theirs: to use, to take, and above all, to fantasize about long after the experience . . . In fact, the political, economic and cultural reality of most Hawaiians is hard, ugly, and cruel.”

--Haunani-Kay Trask

Los Angeles gets 284 sunny days per year,

but your pictures say you’re in Hawaii.

The sun sprinkles its warmth on vivacious

greens impossible for traveled, tired,

and snow-packed water to grow. I can tell

you’re in Hawaii while I sit with a partner

who, if we go, cries every time she lands,

who steers us away from family on the islands,

who never entertains the idea of moving “home”

because her life is measured by a blood quantum,

and as much as she achieves, she, like her parents,

carry a debt accrued on every West to East mile

while growing from a sun that doesn’t sprinkle

and water that navigates from mountain to coast

with a tax on every North to South mile. She can tell

you are in Hawaii and hopes you have a good time.

Beer, Blonde Highlights, and Roasted Pig

A few years from fresh off the boat,

Brown Cousin says they are happier

back home with none of the worries.

In my head, I fill in the worried blanks:

a mortgage and boys, remittances

and maybe racism.

We are talking while I slowly turn

the suckling pig over the fire.

Its brined skin starting to brown, crisp,

crackle like the lechon recipe I found online

said it would. And we sip on San Miguel

beer I found at the .99cent Store

because the Korean market is too far

from my home, but my Asianness

can also be weighed in the heft

of full grocery bags, long receipts,

and single digits. I think her tongue

confuses happy for simple,

which translates to better,

but when I asked if she’d go back

to our happier home country,

she announced she was moving

to the middle of America, land locked,

as if knowing happy has finite energy

that will, at best, get you across an ocean.

She moved inland as if to be everything

opposite of what she was.

The Buffet Boy Creates a Religion

This moon-faced Asian kid

walked out of my aspirations

and into the Christmas buffet line.

His bowl cut ran into his eyes,

so he kept his head tilted down

while filling a coffee cup

with pastel-colored marshmallows.

The star-shaped sweets should’ve melted

on a puddle of chocolate,

but the cup dried as the boy mashed

constellations into each other

like a god tired of an expanding

and too-sharp universe.

This deity, who is all I want to be,

came back to serve his mother

a plate of stuffed chicken on a green bed

and decorated with two blue stars—

saccharine and intentionally sacrificial.

And on the third trip, he packed

a coffee cup with cookies while his mother

checked her phone but beckoned.

He pretended to drink from it

when he approached her

as if the sweet bread turned to liquid,

and she believed.

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.