a triangle square book for young readers
published by seven stories press
Copyright © 2019 by Patrice Vecchione and Alyssa Raymond
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Book design by Abigail Miller
library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
names: Vecchione, Patrice, editor. | Raymond, Alyssa, editor.
title: Ink knows no borders : poems of the immigrant and refugee experience / edited by Patrice Vecchione and Alyssa Raymond.
description: New York : Seven Stories Press, [2019] | Audience: Grades 7-8. | “A Triangle Square Book for young readers.” | Includes bibliographical references and index.
identifiers: LCCN 2018052736 (print) | LCCN 2018059209 (ebook) | ISBN 9781609809089 (Ebook) | ISBN 9781609809072 | ISBN 9781609809072 (paperback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781609809089 (ebook)
subjects: LCSH: Immigrants—United States—Juvenile poetry. | Refugees—United States—Juvenile poetry. | American poetry—21st century.
classification: LCC PS617 (ebook) | LCC PS617.I53 2019 (print) | DDC 811/.60803581—dc 3
lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018052736
Printed in the USA.
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Editors’ Note
Patrice Vecchione and Alyssa Raymond
Foreword
Javier Zamora
Departure: July 30, 1984
Joseph O. Legaspi
Immigrant
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
First Light
Chen Chen
Origin / Adoption
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello
Dear America
Sholeh Wolpé
Second Attempt Crossing
Javier Zamora
Bent to the Earth
Blas Manuel De Luna
A Hymn to Childhood
Li-Young Lee
Immigrant Aria
Rajiv Mohabir
On Being American
Samira Ahmed
Oklahoma
Hala Alyan
On Listening to Your Teacher Take Attendance
Aimee Nezhukumatathil
The Break-In
Hafizah Geter
#Sanctuary
JoAnn Balingit
Extended Stay America
Janine Joseph
Choi Jeong Min
Franny Choi
Muslim Girlhood
Leila Chatti
Fluency
Michelle Brittan Rosado
Master Film
Solmaz Sharif
The Key
Ladan Osman
Ode to the Heart
Ellen Bass
The Sign in My Father’s Hands
Martín Espada
History Lesson
Jeff Coomer
My Father Takes to the Road
Jeff Tagami
My Grandmother Washes Her Feet in the Sink of the Bathroom at Sears
Mohja Kahf
Frank’s Nursery and Crafts
Bao Phi
In Colorado My Father Scoured and Stacked Dishes
Eduardo C. Corral
Learning to Pray
Kaveh Akbar
Naturalization
Jenny Xie
East Mountain View
Paul Tran
Acolyte
Tarfia Faizullah
Tater Tot Hot-Dish
Hieu Minh Nguyen
Pronounced
Carlos Andrés Gómez
Off-Island Chamorros
Craig Santos Perez
A New National Anthem
Ada Limón
Portrait of Isako in Wartime
Mia Ayumi Malhotra
Domesticity
Kristin Chang
The Poet at Fifteen
Erika L. Sánchez
Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong
Ocean Vuong
ode to the first white girl i ever loved
José Olivarez
Talks about Race
Mahtem Shiferraw
Mama
Emtithal Mahmoud
Split
Cathy Linh Che
When the Man at the Party Said He Wanted to Own a Filipino
Marianne Chan
Ode to Enclaves
Chrysanthemum Tran
Ethnic Studies
Terisa Siagatonu
The Day I Realized We Were Black
Yesenia Montilla
quaking conversation
Lenelle Moïse
Atlantis
Elizabeth Acevedo
The Border: A Double Sonnet
Alberto Ríos
Las Casas Across Nations
Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs
Mexicans Begin Jogging
Gary Soto
Field Guide Ending in a Deportation
Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
I Used to Be Much Much Darker
Francisco X. Alarcón
A Habitable Grief
Eavan Boland
Return
Gala Mukomolova
Adrift
Alice Tao
Author’s Prayer
Ilya Kaminsky
Game Of Thrones
Fatimah Asghar
Oh, Daughter
Monica Sok
Refugees
Brian Bilston
Home
Safiya Sinclair
Undocumented Joy
Yosimar Reyes
self-portrait with no flag
Safia Elhillo
Afterword
Emtithal Mahmoud
Acknowledgments
Biographies
Permissions
Index
To be rooted is perhaps the most important
and least recognized need of the human soul.
—simone weil
I wish maps would be without
borders & that we belonged
to no one & to everyone
at once, what a world that
would be.
—yesenia montilla
let me tell you what a poem brings . . .
it is a way to attain a life without boundaries.
—juan felipe herrera
Editors’ Note
At the time of this writing, with the manuscript of Ink Knows No Borders nearly complete, the United States is in a dismal mess. Children are separated from their families as they attempt to enter the country, young people who were brought to the US as children without documentation are threatened with deportation, and the Supreme Court has allowed the president to carry out his ban on immigrants based on the idea that some human beings are “illegal.”
In his poem “Off-Island Chamorros,” Craig Santos Perez writes this truth: “Remember: / home is not simply a house, village, or island; home / is an archipelago of belonging.” For people to leave their home and cross a harsh desert or sea, often with small childre
n in tow, they must be fleeing something too difficult for many of us to fully imagine: civil war, political or religious persecution, gang violence, lack of work, hunger, or natural disaster.
Ink Knows No Borders celebrates the lives of immigrants, refugees, exiles, and their families, who have for generations brought their creative spirits, resilience and resourcefulness, determination and hard work, to make this land a home. They have come from the Philippines, Iran, Mexico, Russia, Vietnam, El Salvador, Sudan, Haiti, Syria, you name it. Enter the place of these poems, bordered only by the porousness of paper, and you’ll find the world’s people striving and thriving on American soil.
There is the daughter whose mother packed three days’ worth of underwear in a ziplock bag in case ICE showed up at her school, the child wishing to change her name to something more “American,” the dried desert creek where forty people sleep, the beer company that “did not hire Blacks or Puerto Ricans,” an immigrant mother’s vindication when her math, much to the surprise of fellow shoppers, is proven correct at a check-out counter, a son who “ached to be [as] beautiful” as his praying Muslim father, the fifteen-year-old who understands her parents as poorly as they understand her, the young poet who writes, “I don’t know how to think of this— / I wasn’t taught to notice one’s colors,” and more, so much more.
These poets know that the pen holds a secret, a secret that can only be uncovered by putting that pen to paper, in a crowded coffee shop or some solitary place, maybe in the middle of night or when the dawn won’t let you sleep, inspired, as you are, by birdsong or your own song. They know that “This story is mine to tell.” These lived stories, fire-bright and coal-hot acts of truth telling, are the poet’s birthright—and a human right.
Whether you were born in this country or another, whether you came here with the help of a “coyote,” crammed in a too-small boat, or with a visa and papers in order, whatever your skin color or first language may be, whomever you love, writing poems is a way to express your most authentic truths, the physical ache of despair, the mountaintop shout of your joy. Writing poetry will help you realize that you are stronger than you thought you were and that within your tenderness is your fortitude.
Not only does ink know no borders; neither does the heart.
patrice vecchione and alyssa raymond
Foreword
america, am I not your refugee?
—fatimah asghar
¿When & how can you start to tell the story of where you or your family comes from? ¿The why of being in another country? ¿And should you? Growing up in San Rafael, California, after emigrating from El Salvador unaccompanied at the age of nine, I never asked these questions. Didn’t dare. From the moment I crossed the border through the Sonoran Desert—no, way before that—from the morning I said goodbye to Grandpa from the back of a bus near the Guatemala–Mexico border, I knew never to speak of what would happen.
I would not see Grandpa for six years, Grandma for nineteen. When I was reunited with my parents, they told me not to tell anyone about being born in another country, about my “illegal entry,” about what I had experienced those two months when no one knew my whereabouts, when even the people in my parents’ ESL class prayed and lit candles so I would make it here safely. It became my secret. In her poem “Return,” Gala Mukomolova writes, “It happens, teachers said, that a child between countries will refuse to speak.” Absolutely. Since our reunion in Arizona, I’ve spoken to my parents about those two months only twice in my life. Both times, after I started writing poetry. Both times, their guilt, their remorse, their asking for forgiveness, made us stop with the questions, and we let out our tears.
Before I had the tools (the pen and paper of poetry) to replay, analyze, revise the trauma my “refugee story” embodied, I held all of that anger deep inside, believing that what I had been through could be forgotten, but trauma doesn’t work that way. I thought no one—not my parents, not my friends, not the best counselor—could understand what I had experienced. I truly believed I had been the only nine-year-old who had migrated by himself, crossed an ocean, three countries, and a desert. Like Mahtem Shiferraw describes in her poem “Talks about Race,” “I [didn’t] know how to fit, adjust myself within new boundaries— / nomads like me have no place as home, no way of belonging.” I started drinking and hanging out with the wrong people in my apartment complex. Wearing certain “gang” colors. My friends and I were not real gangsters; we were just trying to prove ourselves to one another. I could’ve been an honor-roll student in middle school, but my behavior kept me from it. Once, I threw a bottle of water at my seventh-grade teacher. I was kicked out of class multiple times for saying something vulgar to make everyone laugh. I needed to be seen. Heard. I wanted someone to ask me what was wrong with me and truly mean it. For me to be able to break down and cry in front of them. That never happened.
Because I was good at soccer, in part because I let my anger out on the soccer field, I got a fancy scholarship to attend a fancy high school. My first real culture shock. Adjusting to the US after migrating was difficult, but at my elementary and middle schools, everyone looked like me. Not at Branson. I was one of six Latinx students in the entire school of 272. I put up a front. Guarded myself with the baggy clothes, slicked-back hair, gold chain that said “El Salvador,” and too much cologne. Even the seniors were scared of me. They’d never seen anyone from my part of Marin County. I continued to act out in class. I wanted to lose my scholarship so I could attend the public high school with my brown friends. Luckily, after the third time I got kicked out of both freshman math and English, I was asked to meet with all my teachers and my soccer coach. They showed me that they really believed in me and gave me an opportunity to succeed. After four years at Branson, I got into UC Berkeley.
It was in high school that I allowed poetry to discover me. My senior-year English teacher devoted a full three weeks to the subject, bringing in a real-life poet, Rebecca Foust, who reintroduced me to Pablo Neruda. My parents owned a CD of Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair in Spanish, which I hated. But now, seeing Spanish and English on the same page was like magic: the first moment the two sides of my identity existed side by side. And when Neruda talked about the landscape of Chile, his verses reminded me of home. I wrote my first poem “Mi Tierra (My Land),” and began to rediscover what I had tried to forget. Neruda led me to Roque Dalton, Claribel Alegría, Sharon Olds, June Jordan, Yusef Komunyakaa, Charles Simic, and eventually to some poets in this anthology. Poetry showed me that I was not alone. Like Safia Elhillo writes in her poem “self-portrait with no flag,” “i pledge[d] allegiance to my / homies.” My first real homies—the ones who gave me permission to face my trauma of immigrating, of having left “home”—were poets.
I’d lived a childhood in El Salvador; but like Li-Young Lee says in his poem “A Hymn to Childhood,” I just didn’t know “which childhood” that had been. ¿Was it one that would “never end,” one that I would “never escape”? I knew for certain it was one that “didn’t last.” It ended too soon. I’d traded hide-and-seek with my friends for real-life hiding from the authorities, in boats, under buses, under bushes. What guided me was the hope of seeing my parents again. That I would finally meet the father that had left me when I was about to turn two. The father who had once held me on his shoulders as he ran on the soccer field before his game. On the page, because of poetry, I could write that reality, those images I’d heard about. I could replay Mom’s palms caressing my head before I went to bed.
Poetry let me tap into these and many other memories. It let me tap into everything I’ve revealed to you now. It has taught me that it’s OK to open up. It’s OK to look inward, to hold those around us accountable for their actions. Taught me that speaking out is the beginning of healing. I thank my parents for listening to my poems even though the poems were not nice to them. I’m not saying I have completely healed. I’m not saying poetry can fix everything, because it hasn’t, but it was the beginning, the const
ant thing, on my road to my own healing. Like Ocean Vuong writes in his poem “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong,” “the end of the road is so far ahead / it is already behind us” and “The most beautiful part of your body / is where it’s headed.” I can see the end now. I can imagine the next step. I know for a fact, I wouldn’t be able to do that had poetry not found me. Had I not believed, even for a second, in its magic.
I’m writing this at my childhood home in El Salvador, outside with frogs and birds all round. My house is in the flight path from the airport and I remember imagining, as a child, every plane was a plane to the US. Four, five times a day I looked up, seeing the path I hoped to take to be reunited with my parents. It did not occur that way. I did not experience the privilege Lena Khalaf Tuffaha describes in her poem “Immigrant” of leaving my homeland “on the magic carpet of [my] navy blue / US [passport].” I will soon experience that, however. I passed my visa interview and am currently waiting for my passport. It was poetry, not soccer, that got me to college and eventually opened up a path toward an EB-1 visa, a Green Card.
It’s been difficult to be here, the place I wanted to return to, but hadn’t for nineteen years. Last night I heard gunshots. This morning, the church bells rang, signaling another death. It has been difficult to see how much it has changed, how much I have changed. Like Craig Santos Perez writes in his poem “Off-Island Chamorros,” I “feel foreign in [my] own homeland.” I’ve been here three weeks, living in uncertainty, not knowing if I would get approved. All this time children have been separated from their families at the US border. I’m reading and watching the news in the country many of those families are fleeing. It has been a blessing to have the poets you will find in these pages here with me. I’m lucky I can hold these poems close, to show me how to process what I’m living through.
javier zamora
Departure: July 30, 1984
We were not prepared for it—
America, the land cut like a massive slab
of steak. Our mother did not sit us down
to explain, and nothing was said
over the black coffee and rice
soup at mealtimes. My siblings and I approached
our inevitable leaving with numb
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