Slow Violence

The man that I love rinses our recyclables.

The first man to love me

bears the face of  his father,

whom he loved, who loved

his country, who left it,

bereft of all but anger.

I pray toward Mecca in a shirt

sewn by someone who wasn’t paid,

a woman, the hands of many

women with whom I might share

a last name, an adjacent complexion,

a greater susceptibility to diabetes.

The first man to love me says

immigration is like natural selection.

The peppered moth darkened

when trees covered by lichen blackened.

There is a symbolic difference

between distance and direction.

I contaminate my life by living it.