No One Has Ever Told Me To Go Back to My Planet, But If They Did, I’d Roll Up My Hoopty’s Window and Listen to M.E.T.H.O.D Man

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By Alan Chazaro

simply to feel the air and bounce of my 5th grade self, when we’d gather
around Aldo’s boombox like acolytes ready to worship inside a temple

in the slums of Shaolin. For the diss tracks and interludes
looping uninterrupted in our empty apartment while Pa was off at work. It works:

listening to the hype I grew up on as Californian Pochito.
When we studied the Wu’s interdimensional arts, learned

how to teleport across coasts, into the shadows of the 36 chambers
within myself. Back then, all my neighbors were Vietnamese, and the smell of fish

and oil and somewhere faraway brought me back home. Yes, this is home. And
wherever I go I drag this unsheltered memory with me, as my shelter. True,

I’ve stepped out to hold different suns in my mouth while reciting lyrics in foreign tongues.
I’ve tripped on new shit, not always old shit, but always good shit. Believe

me when I say I’m ready to conjure the elixirs of hip hop mixed with single-parent
love mixed with a cassette tape stuck on rewind, wherever my spaceship drifts.

Believe me when I tell you I am searching for better worlds. Believe
we will one day get there.

Alan Chazaro is the author of This Is Not a Frank Ocean Cover Album (Black Lawrence Press, 2019) and the forthcoming Piñata Theory (Black Lawrence Press, 2020). He is a graduate of June Jordan’s Poetry for the People program at UC Berkeley and a Lawrence Ferlinghetti Fellow at the University of San Francisco’s MFA program. He is currently a creative writing adjunct professor in the Bay Area, and the co-founding editor at HeadFake.