Christian Hanz Lozada
Writing for the Mixed Race
At The End of The Long Dark Hallway
is our craft room. When we bought the house,
Nani and I fought for it. She wanted it as the guest room,
and maybe, if God or some other source of miracles wills it,
the baby’s room. I wanted it for the craft room.
It has the biggest windows in the house,
its own glass entrance and all the natural light needed
to write, to paint, to build, to create everything but a child.
Six months into the house, and I’m the only one that uses
the room. I write poems like this one. And when I leave
the room, down the long dark hallway, towards the bathroom
I can see my silhouette in the mirror above the sink.
I’m all shadow, bald, and big almost shapeless, almost.
I think I’m seeing Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, haunted
by futility, mortality, and the unspoken definitions of impotence.
Christian Hanz Lozada is the son of an immigrant Filipino and a descendant of the Southern Confederacy. He knows the shape of hope and exclusion. He authored the poetry collection He’s a Color, Until He’s Not and co-authored Leave with More Than You Came With. His poems have appeared in journals from California to Australia with stops in Hawaii, Korea, and the United Kingdom. Christian has featured at the Autry Museum and Beyond Baroque. He lives in San Pedro, CA and uses his MFA to teach his neighbors and their kids at Los Angeles Harbor College.
