is not natural
or supernatural.
i want to talk about disasters.
how men make them
with embargoes, exploitation,
stigma, sabotage, scalding
debt and cold shoulders.
talk centuries
of political corruption
so commonplace
it’s lukewarm, tap.
talk january 1, 1804
and how it shed life.
talk 1937
and how it bled death.
talk 1964. 1986. 1991. 2004. 2008.
how history is the word
that makes today
uneven, possible.
talk new orleans,
palestine, sri lanka,
the bronx and other points
of connection.
talk resilience and miracles.
how haitian elders sing in time
to their grumbling bellies
and stubborn hearts.
how after weeks under the rubble,
a baby is pulled out,
awake, dehydrated, adorable, telling
stories with old-soul eyes.
how many more are still
buried, breathing, praying and waiting?
intact despite the veil of fear and dust
coating their bruised faces?
i want to talk about our irreversible dead.
the artists, the activists, the spiritual leaders,
the family members, the friends, the merchants,
the outcasts, the cons.
all of them, my newest ancestors.
all of them, hovering now,
watching our collective response,
keeping score, making bets.
i want to talk about money.
how one man’s recession might be
another man’s unachievable reality.
how unfair that is.
how i see a haitian woman’s face
every time i look down at a hot meal,
slip into my bed, take a sip of water,
show mercy to a mirror.
how if my parents had made different
decisions three decades ago,
it could have been my arm
sticking out of a mass grave.
i want to talk about gratitude.
i want to talk about compassion.
i want to talk about respect.
how even the desperate deserve it.
how haitians sometimes greet each other with
the two words “honor”
and “respect.”
how we all should follow suit.
try every time you hear the word “victim,”
you think “honor.”
try every time you hear the tag “john doe,”
you shout “respect!”
because my people have names.
because my people have nerve.
because my people are
your people in disguise.
i want to talk about haiti.
i always talk about haiti.
my mouth quaking with her love,
complexity, honor and respect.
come sit, come stand, come
cry with me. talk.
there’s much to say.
walk. much more to do.
Lenelle Moïse
Atlantis
Whenever I talk about Dominican-Haitian relations
I’m told, you, daughter of Manhattan,
of a multitude of diasporas,
what know you of this island?
What I know is simple:
The island of my people
has twin saltwater lakes,
one on the side of Haiti,
the other, in the Dominican Republic.
They are three miles apart,
and for the last ten years,
they’ve both been rising.
What I know is simple:
This island is a history of tangled tresses
I struggle to comb through.
This island, the first wound in the western world.
This island, the first place to undo its locks.
This island, strips people stateless,
stakes them to the wrong side of a cross,
pushes them to a borderland between lakes.
This island, split discs at the mountain spine.
What I know is simple:
Even when the nations misremember,
the land is older. The water is older.
Lake Enriquillo and Laz Azuei
have both been rising, like twin sisters
unpressing themselves from the mud,
stretching up and out
fingering the fields that
once held yucca, and sugarcane;
drowning crops, embalming them in salt.
What I know is this is an unprecedented event.
These two bodies of water
reaching towards each other
as if they’ve forgotten to whom they owe patriotism.
Or maybe it’s simply that they’ve remembered,
that sometimes the only way to get family to wade in the water,
is to extend to them this unholy baptism.
Elizabeth Acevedo
The Border: A Double Sonnet
The border is a line that birds cannot see.
The border is a beautiful piece of paper folded carelessly in half.
The border is where flint first met steel, starting a century of fires.
The border is a belt that is too tight, holding things up but making it
hard to breathe.
The border is a rusted hinge that does not bend.
The border is the blood clot in the river’s vein.
The border says Stop to the wind, but the wind speaks another
language, and keeps going.
The border is a brand, the “Double-X” of barbed wire scarred into the
skin of so many.
The border has always been a welcome stopping place but is now a Stop
sign, always red.
The border is a jump rope still there even after the game is finished.
The border is a real crack in an imaginary dam.
The border used to be an actual place but now it is the act of a
thousand imaginations.
The border, the word border, sounds like order, but in this place they do
not rhyme.
The border is a handshake that becomes a squeezing contest.
The border smells like cars at noon and woodsmoke in the evening.
The border is the place between the two pages in a book where the
spine is bent too far.
The border is two men in love with the same woman.
The border is an equation in search of an equals sign.
The border is the location of the factory where lightning and thunder
are made.
The border is “NoNo” the Clown, who can’t make anyone laugh.
The border is a locked door that has been promoted.
The border is a moat but without a castle on either side.
The border has become Checkpoint Chale.
The border is a place of plans constantly broken and repaired and
broken.
The border is mighty, but even the parting of the seas created a path,
not a barrier.
The border is a big, neat, clean, clear black line on a map that does not
exist.
The border is the line in new bifocals: below, small things get bigger;
above, nothing changes.
The border is a skunk with a white line down its back.
Alberto Ríos
Las Casas Across Nations
These houses raised me,
teaching me to see the world through bifocals:
The house on Brooklyn,
where we defrosted the Thanksgiving turkey for mole
by throwing it up and down the stairs.
In the Buena Vista Migrant Camp,
a man fried eggs on his motor every morning.
There, at eight years old, I was the only licensed childcare provider.
The house on Privada de Volantín
gave me a kiss when I was twelve
that has lasted a lifetime.
There, among the other miracles of my life,
I learned that jello can survive outside the fridge.
Near the owner’s house, in the apple orchards,
I learned to cover my mouth before dirt
made it its property.
In Ciudad Juárez, my mother made water
and food out of sand, with only her love
and a transistor radio.
On Juan N. Zubirán, where our house
was lower down than the rest,
I learned that dignity
is carried mostly by the neck.
In El Rancho, in Mexico,
I learned to kill a pig with a knitting needle
by going for his heart,
and in Chicago, I learned that a pig can kill you.
At Campus Road in LA, in Ray Otero’s sociology class,
I learned success is not about “The Color Game,”
but whether or not you have a car.
At 22 Sudden, in Watsonville, children
were having children,
desperate to birth the fruit
of their parents’ wishes.
On Bronte, in California, I sang to pray, and sang to eat,
and sang to drink a better part of myself,
while Mamá began to die through her breast,
that monument all its own, that container of pesticides
from the broccoli, cauliflower, apples,
strawberries, blackberries,
and peaches eaten on the line.
Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs
Mexicans Begin Jogging
At the factory I worked
In the fleck of rubber, under the press
Of an oven yellow with flame,
Until the border patrol opened
Their vans and my boss waved for us to run.
“Over the fence, Soto,” he shouted,
And I shouted that I was American.
“No time for lies,” he said, and pressed
A dollar in my palm, hurrying me
Through the back door.
Since I was on his time, I ran
And became the wag to a short tail of Mexicans—
Ran past the amazed crowds that lined
The street and blurred like photographs, in rain.
I ran from that industrial road to the soft
Houses where people paled at the turn of an autumn sky.
What could I do but yell vivas
To baseball, milkshakes, and those sociologists
Who would clock me
As I jog into the next century
On the power of a great, silly grin.
Gary Soto
Field Guide Ending in a Deportation
I confess to you my inadequacies. I want to tell you things I do not know about myself. I’ve made promises to people whom I will never see again. I’ve cried in an airport bathroom stall in El Paso, TX when immigration denied my father’s application. It felt like a mathematical equation—everything on one side needed to equal everything on the other. It almost made sense to be that sad. I am not compelled to complicate this metaphor. I’m selling this for two dollars. Years ago, on my birthday, I came out to my friends. I thought about the possibility of painting their portraits. What a stupid idea. I’ve started to cover up certain words with Barbie stickers in my journal. It occurs to me, sitting in my car, at a Dollar General parking lot, in search of cheap balloons for a party which I do not care about, that I am allowed my own joy. I pick the brightest balloons, pay, drive home and dress for the party. I mouth the words happy birthday to you in a dark room lit by everyone’s phone cameras. Afterwards, I enter all of my emails from five years into a cloud engine and the most used word is ok. I confess that I have had a good life. I spend many nights obsessing over the placement of my furniture. I give you my boredom. I give you my obligation. I give you the night I danced and danced and danced at a child’s birthday party, drunk and by myself. I’ve been someone else’s shame. It’s true, at its core, amá was deported because she was hit by a car. For years to come, this will be the ending of a sad joke she likes to tell. I laugh each time she tells the joke to strangers. Something about how there is more metal than bone in her arm. Something about a magnet. She says I thought I had died and death meant repeating a name forever. She says el jardin encierra la boca de mis pasos. But this is a bad translation. It’s more like I felt like a star, I felt like somebody famous.
Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
I Used to Be Much Much Darker
I used to be
much much darker
dark as la tierra
recién llovida
and dark was all
I ever wanted:
dark tropical
mountains
dark daring
eyes
dark tender lips
and I would sing
dark
dream dark
talk only dark
happiness
was to spend
whole
afternoons
tirado como foca
bajo el sol
“you’re already
so dark
muy prieto
too indio!”
some would lash
at my happy
darkness but
I could only
smile back
now I’m not as
dark as I once was
quizás sean
los años
maybe I’m too
far up north
not enough sun
not enough time
but anyway
up here “dark”
is only for
the ashes
the stuff
lonely nights
are made of
Francisco X. Alarcón
A Habitable Grief
Long ago
I was a child in a strange country:
I was Irish in England.
I learned
a second language there
which has stood me in good stead:
the lingua franca of a lost land.
A dialect in which
what had never been could still be found:
that infinite horizon. Always far
and impossible. That contrary passion
to be whole.
This is what language is:
a habitable grief. A turn of speech
for the everyday and ordinary abrasion
of losses such as this:
which hurts
just enough to be a scar.
And heals just enough to be a nation.
Eavan Boland
Return
There are poets with history and poets without history, Tsvetsaeva claimed, living
through the ruin of Russia.
Karina says disavow every time I see her. We, the daughters between
countries,
wear our mean mothers like scarves around our necks.
Every visit, mine recounts all the wrongs done against her
ring sent for polishing returned with a lesser diamond, Years of never rest and,
she looks at me, of nothing to be proud.
I am covered in welts and empty pockets so large sobs escape me in the
backroom
of my landlord’s fabric shop. He moves to wipe my tears
as if I’m his daughter or
I’m no one’s daughter.
It’s true, I let him take my hand, I am a girl who needs something. I slow
cook
bone grief, use a weak vo
ice.
My mother calls me the girl with holes in her hands every time I lose
something.
All Russian daughters were snowflakes once, and in their hair a ribbon long
as their body knotted and knotted and knotted into a large translucent bow.
It happens, teachers said, that a child between countries will refuse to speak.
A girl with a hole in her throat, every day I opened the translation book.
Silent, I took my shoes off when I came home,
I put my house clothes on.
We had no songs, few rituals. On Yom Kippur, we lit a candle for the dead
and no one knew a prayer.
We kept the candle lit, that’s all.
The wave always returns, and always returns a different wave.
I was small. I built a self outside my self because a child needs shelter.
Not even you knew I was strange.
I ate the food my family ate, I answered to my name.
Gala Mukomolova
Adrift
The little river
with soft ripples
sent me adrift
to a rudderless life—
no anchor.
My hometown
remote but alive
here on my tongue.
Could I go home again
where poetry nurtured me?
Would the little river
receive me back to its flow?
Alice Tao
Author’s Prayer
If I speak for the dead, I must leave
this animal of my body,
I must write the same poem over and over,
for an empty page is the white flag of their surrender.
If I speak for them, I must walk on the edge
of myself, I must live as a blind man
who runs through rooms without
touching the furniture.
Yes, I live. I can cross the streets asking “What year is it?”
I can dance in my sleep and laugh
in front of the mirror.
Even sleep is a prayer, Lord,
I will praise your madness, and
in a language not mine, speak
of music that wakes us, music
in which we move. For whatever I say
is a kind of petition, and the darkest
days must I praise.
Ilya Kaminsky
Game Of Thrones
If this is how I get my family back
then let me have it. My land of water
-fall & mountains before the parking
lot full of dead corpses. Put me back
in a time where I could fight.
When fighting was more than poring
Ink Knows No Borders Page 7
