Christian Hanz Lozada

It Isn’t Ignoring, It’s Love

Christian Hanz Lozada

The good years at home were the ones when Brown Dad worked constantly. White Mom did the same thing: work constantly, especially when Brown Dad was home.

Brown Brothers, Mixed-race me, and White Brother learned learned to work constantly. The ideal relationship is never seeing your partner. Brown Dad and White Mom sleep in separate rooms, for work, she says Brown Brother 1 lives a continent away from his wife and kids for work, he says Brown Brother 2 divorced for work, he says White Brother works 12 hours a day 6 days a week constantly

Love, for us, is mixed with desperation what good is love, if the kids gotta eat? what good is love, if it needs attention? Do you know how hard it is to express love by saying I don’t want to see you?

Moving on Up

Christian Hanz Lozada

Did you know, with success, you have to learn new rules, white rules? And by the time many of us get there, we are so broken, tired, to learn. After sacrificing his health for 15 years, Brown Dad crawled out of the third world with two kids and the ghetto with two more kids and a wife on his back out and to the suburbs. As soon as we moved in, he bought chickens, to make noise whenever there was movement to make eggs for breakfast to make Fountain Valley home. This angered the shit out of our White neighbors, as did the derelict cars on the front lawn, as he hoped, wanted, tried to fix them. And he’d see his accomplishments: a menagerie in the back a mansion in the middle a fleet of cars up front as a life worth living.

But when you see the families in the neighborhood grow when you see kids become friends become families when you see block parties without invitations you start to feel like a blemish a blemish on the pure, clean, White face of the neighborhood.

Chasing a Happy Memory

Christian Hanz Lozada

Sometimes my older brothers would cook porkchops in the afternoon, during those hours after school when our parents were working and we hid in fear instilled by White Mom and Brown Dad of the dark people outside our door, I only have the fear to describe the neighborhood not fact, never fact. Sometimes my older brothers would cook porkchops in the afternoon, seasoned with Lowry’s, and sitting on white rice. It was magical: the salt, the fat, the grease When our normal was beans and rice and absence, a porkchop and Lowry’s are a goddamned miracle.

A child doesn’t know absence without those rare and beautiful moments when your manoy would turn on the stove and feed you.

Christian Hanz Lozada is the product of an immigrant Filipino and Daughter of the American Revolution and has co-written the poetry book Leave with More Than You Came With, published by Arroyo Secco Press and a photographic history book Hawaiians in Los Angeles. His poetry has been anthologized in Gutters and Alleyways: Poems on Poverty, Cadence Collective, and his poems and stories have appeared in Hawaii Pacific Review (forthcoming), Dryland: A Literary Journal (forthcoming), A&U Magazine, Spot Literary Journal, Blue Collar Review and various other journals. He hosted the Read on till Morning literary series and Harbor College Poetry Night, and has been invited to read or speak at the Autry Museum, the Twin Towers Correctional Facility, and other places throughout Southern California.