I found my family thirty years after
the end of a secret Southeast Asian war.

People always ask, “How did it feel?”
They hate replies that include sci-fi,
old Thai ghosts, a monk who longed to be
a poet’s father so badly he lied.

Reunions are worth seeking, but like Oedipus,
it’s a roll of shaved dice in a comedy of strangers.

As a teen I didn’t dare date Asians,
fearing we were siblings.

After finding my family, I learned the gulf was too wide
to stay with someone from the same place.
Still, I got a poem to read at the Olympics
about a sacred ancestral peak that I once crossed.

Yesterday I saw a picture posted online of a new child,
another adoptee welcomed into the world, certainly related.
Another was announcing their latest divorce.

The word processor tries to convince me “adoptees” is a typo,
while I remember a woman who told me indignantly
you can’t adopt babies from Laos. Period.
For a hot second I didn’t exist, or I was a liar.

One niece has a deported father who escaped the Killing Fields.
Point blank she asked me over Christmas dinner
why I keep coming as if I belong. She’s four.

I think of a baby of mine, aborted.
A journal about grinding up stones.
A poet who turned their back on me because
one night beneath our weretiger moon

I said their writing was universal, but bloodless.

Next up in the portfolio: “Behold and Forbid Them Not: Notes of an Adoptee” by Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello