when trying to pin my shaded skin to their collection of hides,
but I want to flip and further the question: where
are you from, and why don’t you go back?
because there is privilege in knowing one place
where ancestors are buried and where home is
that the mixed-race and displaced don’t have.
So we settle in the comfortable and place our hearts
in recently fabricated hearths, tasting ash
from brush fires we set to cleanse,
but really meant to clear, in our food and on our tongues.
Every day is Ash Wednesday in the colonies. I answer
Where are you from, and why don’t you go back?
with “I pay a voluntary land tax,” making the impossible-
to-answer question, and the ash in my mouth, palatable,
especially when, in the Philippines or England,
I could feel comfortable until someone spoke, could taste
the ghosts of the familiar on my tongue
but not in my stomach.

Christian Hanz Lozada
Christian Hanz Lozada wrote the poetry book He’s a Color Until He’s Not and co-wrote Leave with More Than You Came With, and his short works have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He uses his MFA to teach his neighbors at L.A. Harbor College.
"Where are you from?" can be friendly and interested, or hostile and inquisitive. You have to intuit which it is.