My city-boy father cut off the data to his iPhone
and I wonder: where are all these photos going?
His photos turn me into a traveling circus or a zoo,
my smile locked in frozen flesh and on the Internet
Somebody already knows my father better than I ever will
I found them searching for his car on Google Earth’s street view
My farm-girl mother, embarrassed by how slow
our internet is, can’t stop scrolling on Facebook
with the fingers she cut while mincing garlic to a pulp
not even for the concentrated week I visit home each year
though we all put our attention into our phones because nobody
wants to ask the question that will detonate the day
detonate the Hummer cruising down to Atlantic City
where the casinos love calling my father’s name
he speeds through yellow lights before entering the parkway
while I wring my hands out after cleaning my already-spotless
bathroom tub, where I check my email while I brush my hair
where I play the crossword and text the score to my friends
as a signal that I’m alive despite the suicidal journal entries
I snap pictures of and send to my school email address
I thought I’d be the first to get married among my friends
I was lucky the boy I loved, that we all loved, got arrested
in Sin City, in the desert state I was once enamored with
I am childless and secure I am parenting myself
I trust that my clock’s crusty ten-year-old battery will do no harm
will not explode all over my Green Day and Evanescence posters
when I return to Illinois or California or further back to Seoul
or into the throughline of Illaya, Dumanjug, Cebu my grandfather
brings to me when I emerge unscratched from an overturned car
when my city-heart and my farm-legs run and run loops outside
I will write my parents another letter even their last text
was a single word—fine—so they will know the material of me
is not only living in iCloud or Messenger geotagged and timestamped
I know they’ve Googled me while I try again to find their house
in Ilaya, Dumanjug, Cebu, where Google Earth can’t push past trees
nor access a road with no address nor imagine a path without concrete
but what I can see is my grandmother’s urn, my grandfather’s casket
I take the ashes out and shove a grasshopper into my mouth.