and in reconstructing my cities in miniature, I’m duty-bound to a canon, never to creative liberty. I will string with precision tension the line of poetry about the alley’s swung open jaw, and Yo, who on that flat blue day demonstrated how to make ramen without any water. Wonder of thirst. Backdrop: brick walls beaten gray. Elongated, curlicue affect, our laziest vowels pitched upslope. That we could climb, and keep climbing. All the fathers who were never my father but wished to be. All the men who claimed they were my uncle but lacked the uncaring, the addict’s swagger. Even still, their faces absorbing the flashbulb. Here the canyon treehouse caved in. Here, my most negligible deities sanded down by time—chaparral and Rite Aid cake cones. Just out of shot, a beach or a border, both of them scorned by me. Who they bar from entering and who thrashes ashore all the same. Dead or alive, the doily’s liquid drape. Dead or alive, my first father dusting off the old country, then stowing me across the wings of his back. In the analog photo, I look like I could be his firstborn son. He looks like he could be California. All of him mine.