Torrance

The Santa Anas tug at my auntie’s hair,
thirsting as land thirsts.

When her hair grasps at me, I think
how my hair could be a mirror to hers, if I let it

return. I think, does my mother’s bus route
still exist? And does my grandmother’s,

the one she took each day to the garment district
downtown? I hope to cease being a grandchild

who considers their grandmother’s labor
more than they consider their grandmother,

whose rough hands stitch the couch cover
as I watch, smoothing seams, swaddling its gray skin

into something soft. My grandmother, untranslated
and patient, on the bus to knit her family’s way

into a future which is right now, the future in which
I dream in subtitles in the largest possible font.

I mythmake my family in pursuit of an origin
story that does not exist. Everywhere

I place my weight a web of intricate threads
I try to trace, mistake the edges

for the center of it all—hunger, its many eyes,
its illegible mouths.