My father changed his cash to coinsand stuffed them in machinesto buy us food. The airport joinedmy sense of father’s schemeswith loud commotion. Gleaming walkswhere heels click-clacked—endlessto my childish sense of things. Backwhere home was, a blankness.The streets of Marikina crammedbehind my eye somewhere,or lost in pockets stuffed with crumbsof airplane crackers. Whereonce a memory, only clothesshoved in a small valise.And who’s to say what staying closewould bring us? Father’s peace?A way to keep a self from worry?Or did my father thinkabout this stack of quarters,palmed and warm, the sunkweight of the coins against his thigh?The sound of the exchangefrom one self to another life,a rattle in the cagecausing the rack of a machineto turn its gears and dropa bag of chips, not quite a dream,but here, for now, a stop.
Chain Migration I: Airport Coin-Op Food
Feature Date
- December 25, 2023
Series
- What Sparks Poetry
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“CHAIN MIGRATION I: AIRPORT COIN-OP FOOD” excerpted from THE DIASPORA SONNETS: by Oliver de la Paz.
Copyright © 2023 by Oliver de la Paz.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Meredith C. Pugh
Oliver de la Paz is the Poet Laureate of Worcester, MA for 2023-2025. He is the author and editor of seven books: Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby, Requiem for the Orchard, Post Subject: A Fable, and The Boy in the Labyrinth, a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry. His newest work, The Diaspora Sonnets, is published by Liveright Press (2023). With Stacey Lynn Brown he co-edited A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry. Oliver serves as the co-chair of the Kundiman advisory board. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Poetry, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. He has received grants from the NEA, NYFA, the Artist’s Trust, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and has been awarded multiple Pushcart Prizes. He teaches at the College of the Holy Cross and in the Low-Residency MFA Program at PLU.
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2023 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY
Best Books of 2023: Electric Literature
Winner of the New England Book Award for Poetry
"There is no container more fitting to the conveyance of the nuanced sorrow of the permanent displacement from home, a word ‘ensnared with thorns,’ than the sonnet, certainly as it is practiced by Oliver de la Paz, in metrical couplets, with shimmering music, ‘the syllables of story, // saying then, then, then,’ and a splendorous catalog of details, acutely remembered, and gilded into metaphor. …The tenderness in these poems comes through in their ‘gradations of memory where one // belonged,’ and in their penetrating artfulness, itself a kind of love."
—Diane Seuss
"Here the sonnet takes on de la Paz’s narrative and lyric search for home, for what home means, and how we sing about it when it has been taken away. This is a song everyone needs to hear."
—Matthew Dickman
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