when I first discovered America, I fell in love with the Wild Wild West

There is nothing evocative about your past
with me; I simply opened my eyes in the
greatest country on Earth. Your footsteps
defined the dust on the floorboards
as if solidarity's denotation
hid in the crevices of your boots. You
cocked the brim of your hat to the side
and it flashed its lopsided cowhide grin at me,
beckoning towards a genteel mannerism
Easterners will never fully grasp. I
surveyed your cracked brown hands the way
a farmer looks over a plot of land, and
you said, "honey, your words are parched
and it looks like your malaise is only 'cause
you lack a little lovin'." But I will remember
long summer days spent making love to iron horses
in your deserts, cooking stir fry in your melting pot
and chasing the ancestral ghosts of my racial identity
as if growing up in the only place where
chivalry has not died could somehow help me
to recall foreign memoirs written in my DNA.

But then you took my hand and kissed my fingertips,
opening doors for me in such a bowed manner
that I discovered opportunity