I do Kung-Fu in my dreams—knife block,
eagle claw, spinning backfist and I can’t stop
imagining how death feels to a man

with lightning in his hand, how a punch lands
in a man’s chest when no one is looking
for someone to fight. I watch Kung-Fu

on television in 1979, a facsimile of violence
after dinner every night. No one knows how
I move my body like the breeze across America

in search of my father, living near Sea-Tac
airport, living in California, living everywhere
I am not able to do Kung-Fu—horse stance,

punch-block-punch. My father used to talk
about how his friend Bruce Lee was replaced
by a white man who did Kung-Fu for television,

how fighting on television is choreography
and not the real pain a man feels when he lives
in a body not American enough to be beautiful

because fake Kung-Fu is more dangerous
than the tiger’s furious kiss, fake Chinese
less scary than the golden fire a dragon breathes

for a prime time audience. I don’t know Kung-Fu,
but I do the best Kung-Fu that I can: crane stance
open palm strike—hi-yah! This is what I need

to say: there are so many ways of being a man,
so many ways of talking about the body’s grace,
its fragility at the edges of the desert where I am

looking for any figure resembling my father.
I punch at shadows, try to kick the sky, windmill
my arms to keep from falling over into the dust.

—

W. Todd Kaneko is the author of This is How the Bone Sings (Black Lawrence 2020), and The Dead Wrestler Elegies (New Michigan Press 2021), and co-author with Amorak Huey of Slash / Slash, winner of the 2020 Diode Editions Chapbook Contest. He teaches at Grand Valley State University in Michigan.