Someone says to me
that if I don’t dig it here then
I should go back to where
I came from. 

You are asking me to choose
what stays and what goes.
Which half of myself
should I send back,
and to where?

Divest myself of legs and cock
and balls and ass
and say unto them

go, run back
to Napoli?

Keep the top half
here, call it my Indigenous 
game piece, make moves
as best I can?

Do I have it
backwards and it ought to be
feet don’t leave here now
while the chest and arms and head
are boxed up and sent to Italy? 

I should perhaps split down the middle?

Or carve myself to pieces and
distribute this to there, that 
to here? Say, this finger is
New Mexico, pass it over
Sierra Blanca before
letting it fall to rest
on the rez where I’ve never lived? 
Send this elbow overseas 
to Caserta, to Marciano Arpio
where I’ve never lived?

What cells should go where
if I am to go back to
where I came from?
None of me is directly from right here
so I already feel dislocated
on my own land, after all.
Perhaps I should consider
the land of my birth,
New Jersey? Land of my 
conception, Germany?

All you care about is that I’m gone,
you sneering so certainly
with your comfortable masses behind you.
You never trusted
a half-breed anyway, right?
According to you I’m a mistake.
According to you I’m an anomaly,
an aberration, a never shoulda been.
I’ve only lasted this long
because I look like you — 

and right now, considering 
the white stench suffocating all,
I wish I could discard 
my Whiteness
as I’m not sure, ever, 
that it’s not me
who stinks —
no matter how true, 
it frightens me to say it out loud.

Absurd.

I’m from here, though
I am a jumble.

I will pull the pieces together and say
and do and love and try for
wholeness, not half this,
not half that, try to belong
to myself and be true to myself
and everyone before me
and behind me
and far ahead.

You don’t like it?

You. Go.