Lines Breaking
red pen in hand,
he tells me lines should
break
in order to empha-
size
certain words
like the ones in my family’s history:
first-
shift
second-
shift
third-
shift,
that words are like the earth
shifting
back and
forth during an
earth-
quake
& that verse has more meaning
when words can teeter-
totter.
but as much as I try to
break the lines in their proper
poetic
places
there are words
that I cannot separate,
like father, mother and child,
words that I cannot break again
like father and leaving, mother and deserting,
child and hurting,
words that stay together all by themselves,
like immigration, isolation, desolation.