The Explorer’s Club
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I could have been born in Canada, but
the family cleaved the space between wars.
In the smelter’s shadow the grass bled
arsenic the day great grandpa was born.
The mines didn’t stop for VE day, but he did.
He shot out of that shaft like an artillery shell
into the Bismarck Sea of Papua New Guinea
chasing phantom u-boats smuggling Kaiser gold.
Children spilled out from his wake like bills
from a getaway car. One dream ended, one war began.
His father, grain alcohol, and the hardy boys
convinced grandpa Nazi gold was everywhere.
He turned Lugers into divining rods, magnetized
his tugboat, held a seance with an madame medium
hoping to interrogate the ghost of some admiral
who’d slam his spectral fist on a nautical chart.
I was born between recurring dreams -
of children finding fathers finding treasure.
Dad kept the tugboat - uncle Diego tugged
the medium and my three Aunts mixed
reading and drinking into glory. They wrote
like hapa Hemingways, under pseudonyms,
under their dad’s names, if they knew them,
under one another’s names–they didn’t care.
They all landed at the library by the docks -
They drank and yelled and cooed and wooed
until they turned it into a bar, reciting poems
to boys who entered horny and thirsty and left
with stanzas cantering between their ears.
At some point the family acquired a house
- nobody remembers how or who owned it.
But everyone found their way inside eventually
The men smoked and poured sighs over maps,
traced voyages across the wrinkles of the Pacific.
The women cooked and drank and yelled passages,
while cutting papayas across the spines of old books.
Some families start whole, like a grenade,
but not mine, we were born shrapnel, expelled
into a world where maps still offered questions
to our fathers who refused their answers,
into a world where books still offered refuge
to our mothers who refused their safety.
We followed every whisper, went mad with hope
that the secret was not what was hidden but
what someone else had forgotten - lost.
Our parents don’t recognize their children
by their face or name, they only recognize
their insanity, resonating, and welcomed us home.