Before the shining city on a hill, there was a banyan tree. The night sequined with arrogant youth. A street that merged with a seaside highway where I’d scavenge shorelines looking for anywhere land meets sea meets elsewhere. A decade and a continent later, an asynchronous chorus of voices pleads with Goliath. And I, a candle with a tall flame, have burned through the wax of second chances. Watch me make an epitaph of the American dream. Here lies a people who were sold a nation that is the sum of its mass graves. Here lies my people whose death grew your 401(k). And isn’t it marvelous how the waves keep crashing and the banyan tree’s roots keep spreading in the red soil while the plane’s shadow grows across the land? Look how spring blooms unrelenting. How the sea gets bluer when enraged. Isn’t it a wonder how oceans don’t mix when they meet? Imagine a rift this deep, a refusal this steadfast. O moon, lighting the path of an unchecked army! O America, footing the bill! What’s a few billion dollars between friends? Pray, tell, does it hurt to look at a body and see your reflection in its charred flesh? Here’s my liver, with all its memories, my heels digging a home in the earth. My country, the dethorned rose. My mother, the mother of all heartbreak. My country, my mother. My mother, my heartbreak. Tonight, we are the loneliest trees in the forest, and we can remake this world in our image. Free. Saccharine.