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San Pedro students wide-eye college

with a foreign desperation. They know

this place is necessary but not why.

The geography of their desperation

feels different from traveling into strange,

this one is shaped like an absence,

like the loss of a family pillar,

that person that holds you tight

effortlessly, suddenly gone.

San Pedro parents tell their kids

go to school, even though I didn’t,

even though my parents didn’t.

It’s the only way, now. The students

hear it from uncles and aunts, long

lines of longshoremen generations.

They have mapped out the end

and know it’s shaped like a microchip,

tiny squares with metal tentacles

girded by robot arms and winches,

and no amount of John Henries

can compete. Go to school,

they say, repetitively and consistently

but they mean: “You can’t be

what we were, and I’m sorry.

And they come to class wide-eyed

wanting me to teach them how to

distance themselves from things they hold

dear, to teach them how to distance

themselves from things that held

them and their loves, tight.

Orignally published in Rigorous