I-797-C Notice of Action

REQUEST FOR APPLICANT TO APPEAR FOR INITIAL INTERVIEW

APPLICATION NUMBER MSC XXXXXXX058           A# A XXX XXX 961
Notice Date: July 24, 2014                                                      Priority Date: July 24, 2014
Date of Arrival: February 20, 1984

hereby notified to appear
     how often do you have sex
to adjust status
     what color is his toothbrush
his birth certificate
     what side of the bed does he sleep on
resident alien
     how much does he make
your husband must come with you
     what’s his mother’s name
we may videotape you
     where did you buy your rings
bring an interpreter
     what are his siblings’ spouses’ names
in a sealed envelope bring
     what’s his father’s name
failure to appear
     what’s his father’s name
please appear, as scheduled below

     do you love him
supporting evidence
     why do you love him
Tuesday, March 17, 2015 8:00am USCIS Chicago, IL

don’t mention citizenship
talk about love, how you got married for love

your mother shops for a fish
               a plastic bag for a glove
you untangle the wires with the crew
               a boy among men
you choose the photograph for the wake
               a finger in your mouth
you tied the string too tight
               you were poor but happy
you didn't know what to say
               a balloon's string strung on your wrist
you watch your mother in the blue-black kitchen
               men sag to touch the dancing boys
in the hospital full of Filipina nurses
               dry palm trees rustle in the Santa Ana winds
she grips her ankle on the floor
               you ask what to say and how to say it
she takes her wig off and lights a candle
               to clear the spirits from the room

I've begun to grow fatigued. I've learned that writing poems is possible and possibility diminishes exploration. When I arrive elsewhere, say, to the essay, I feel at play. I feel like I have come upon new toys with no instructions. I wander. I hold at an idea longer. I think freer. I don’t look for the exit door as quickly as I would in a poem. It lets me explore the wildness that I initially found so exciting in poetry. So, in that sense, our trajectories are similar, just going in opposite directions. Exhausted, the essay brought me to poetry. And for you, exhausted, poems are bringing you to the essay. Then, there’s the artless essay, the dreaded personal statement. The last one read: I intend to contribute to the seldom-told narrative of living as an undocumented Filipino-American whose path to citizenship is tied up with another politicized modern moment: the legalization of gay marriage. As a corporeal intersection of both undocumented and queer identities, my body is seen by many as unnatural—a site of horror, a target of the phobic. As such, two major threats loom over the project: the risk of sexually transmitted diseases on the gay male body and deportation for the undocumented non-citizen. For many who share my unique position, the desire for state-sanctioned citizenship is analogous to the cure for HIV, two statuses that are, for now, locked in utopian vision—objects on the horizon. 

Oh, that’s what I was originally thinking of with the notion of swimming or orbiting that you mentioned: a giant essay that interrupts (or cleaves?) into the book. To cleave is to separate and to bring together. To yoke. To it: I’m thinking of this essay I want to write as … Essay as Ocean. Not necessarily in a geographic, landscapey way but weirder, queer, dense, full of strange currents with different temperatures, something immersive, at times panicky, the feeling of losing oxygen but delighted by the sight of strange objects that litter the ocean floor. An oasis of sight. Geography textbooks and all of that richly descriptive language. How can anyone read about the unseen formation of volcanoes or the glacial creation of lakes and not feel connected to the Earth—capital E? Essay as a vast, limitless, edgeless, impossible-to-keep-in-one’s-head-all-at-once phenomenon. Essay as a way of breaking up the rest of the poems that surround it. I wanted to offer a break, a reprieve. Freedom from forms. 

In Zong!, M. NourbeSe Philip writes “Some—all the poems—need a great deal of space around them—as if there is too much cramping around them, as if they need to breathe.” In the first of Nine Stories, a man touches the tender sole of a boy’s foot. The boy runs out to the water then disappears. There are certain words to describe certain waves. Fugitive. Objects are not fugitive, the waves carrying them are. I’ve flown over the Pacific Ocean once—when my family moved to California when I was six. I’ve had my cards read, also only once, with the CHARIOT card blocking one thing from another. It was many years ago and I was maybe drunk and worse, the boy reading me the cards was someone who I was so stupidly in love with that my brain broke when we were together. I was all heart. He pointed his finger to the CHARIOT card and said something about how there must be something locked with the migration when I was six, something that still needed unlocking. He was right. He married and divorced his then-girlfriend and how he has two kids. She lives in one state, he lives in another. Some of that is still true. I arrive on the page, messy and edgeless.