The one who learns that sometimes the enemy is a smiling neighbor too ashamed to reveal herself except behind the dark curtain of the ballot box. Sometimes your enemy is a friend.
You are tired of fighting for your name. And tired of the eternal question: Where are you really from?
You persist.
Because your name is who you are.
You weep.
For a land built on the backs of your black and brown brothers and sisters and soaked in their blood.
You claim your joy.
You lay your roots:
Blood and bone and fire and ash.
And in this land of the free and home of the brave, you plant yourself.
Like a flag.
Samira Ahmed
Oklahoma
For a place I hate, I invoke you often. Stockholm’s: I am eight years old and the telephone poles are down, the power plant at the edge of town spitting electricity. Before the pickup trucks, the strip malls, dirt beaten by Cherokee feet. Osiyo, tsilugi. Rope swung from mule to tent to man, tornadoes came, the wind rearranged the face of the land like a chessboard. This was before the gold rush, the greed of engines, before white men pressing against brown women, nailing crosses by the river, before the slow songs of cotton plantations, the hymns toward God, the murdered dangling like earrings. Under a redwood, two men signed away the land and in history class I don’t understand why a boy whispers sand monkey. The Mexican girls let me sit with them as long as I braid their hair, my fingers dipping into that wet black silk. I try to imitate them at home—mírame, mama—but my mother yells at me, says they didn’t come here so I could speak some beggar language. Heaven is a long weekend. Heaven is a tornado siren canceling school. Heaven is pressed in a pleather booth at the Olive Garden, sipping Pepsi between my gapped teeth, listening to my father mispronounce his meal.
Hala Alyan
On Listening to Your Teacher Take Attendance
Breathe deep even if it means you wrinkle
your nose from the fake-lemon antiseptic
of the mopped floors and wiped-down
doorknobs. The freshly soaped necks
and armpits. Your teacher means well,
even if he butchers your name like
he has a bloody sausage casing stuck
between his teeth, handprints
on his white, sloppy apron. And when
everyone turns around to check out
your face, no need to flush red and warm.
Just picture all the eyes as if your classroom
is one big scallop with its dozens of icy blues
and you will remember that winter your family
took you to the China Sea and you sank
your face in it to gaze at baby clams and sea stars
the size of your outstretched hand. And when
all those necks start to crane, try not to forget
someone once lathered their bodies, once patted them
dry with a fluffy towel after a bath, set out their clothes
for the first day of school. Think of their pencil cases
from third grade, full of sharp pencils, a pink pearl eraser.
Think of their handheld pencil sharpener and its tiny blade.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil
The Break-In
When I close my eyes I see my mother running
from one house to another, throwing her fist
at the doors of neighbors, begging anyone
to call the police.
There are times when every spectator is hungry,
times a thief takes nothing, leaves you a fool
in your inventory.
How one trespass could make all others
suddenly visible. My mother counted
her jewelry and called
overseas. My father counted women
afraid one of us would go
missing. When I close my eyes
I hear my mother saying, “A’aha, this new country,”
my cousins exclaiming “Auntie!”
between the clicking line and their tongues.
Tonight the distance between me, my mother, and Nigeria
is like a jaw splashed against a wall.
I close my eyes and see my father
sulking like a pile of ashes,
his hair jet black and kinky,
his silence entering a thousand rooms.
Then outside, trimming hedges as if home
were a land just beyond the meadow,
the leaves suddenly back.
When I close my eyes
I see my mother, mean for the rest of the day,
rawing my back in the tub
like she’s still doing dishes.
Hafizah Geter
#Sanctuary
The grownups keep saying to be calm and donate to animals
but the storms in my heart are too loud, even if they help you
evolve, Ma says, so for an energy filter I meditate with my iPod
but as soon as someone insists my cleverness is the cause of my anxiety
I want to tell them RELAX is not the same as BE STUPID—
since Friday a dozen people got shot and is it safe
for illegals? Ma believes in love, gratitude, laughter, cupids and candles.
Every time I tell her I can’t cope with the stress, she refers to music.
To me sanctuary is physical, has a body, teeth that can be
kicked in. Ma says I need to get some spirit, we can talk about it
in 15 more minutes. When Angel disappeared, it was his car
registration sticker expired. I can’t believe they call the lockup
ICE. When I say nobody but Native Americans really comes from here
the boy at school says the United States became the greatest thing
that ever happened to the world, even if not everybody
gets to benefit from the rules. He yells, Before we were immigrants
at least we were conquerors! My parents argued when Da found out
how much money Ma gave the elephant fund, while my little sister’s
busy drawing turkey hands and getting in the way. That kid was born here
amongst the conquerors and I bet she marries one. Then I’ll remind her
I am not a flood and nobody opened the gates for me. Now Ma is giving
a dollar to send “Nosey” to a real sanctuary because somebody hooked him
to a trailer weighing more than a ton. I too am a draft horse whose hoofs
need shoes, whose soul is not waterproof, whose energy center leaks,
whose refuge is not horizontal not black & white, more like dawn
rolling over me from grey into a hundred shards of roses hand-painted
in my scared dreams. Sometimes I love how Ma stirs the chili pot
and watches a kangaroo on YouTube. When I say, Ma we need to talk
about a Sanctuary City, she says, Hey isn’t that the name of a cosmetics
center in Arlington? Her motto is “Never microwave anything
you care about.” I’ll save it for my children; but also, “We Are People
Not Preventable Crimes” and “I am a Mini-Donation to Everyone I Know!”
Now that the world is in turmoil, my motto is “Like a raptor
I fall on my enemies with ferocity, because I am kind.”
JoAnn Balingit
Extended Stay America
My mother ran me across
the school quad, swearing
they would come for me
first. In a bag ziplocked
right to left across my lap
she had filled and Pentel-penned
three days worth of underwear
and a cordless telephone
from Pick ’n Save.
I could smell the manure
and saddle leather as we drove
down the 60.
She told me they wouldn’t
hesitate to lug me
by the back of my shirt,
to drag me over the front
yard like a bundle
of firewood. I cracked
the window, left shoe marks
on the motel sheets.
High on Astro Pops
and candy cigarettes,
she said, Now
your classmates will know.
Janine Joseph
Choi Jeong Min
For my parents, Choi Inyeong & Nam Songeun
in the first grade i asked my mother permission
to go by frances at school. at seven years old,
i already knew the exhaustion of hearing my name
butchered by hammerhead tongues. already knew
to let my salty gook name drag behind me
in the sand, safely out of sight. in fourth grade
i wanted to be a writer & worried
about how to escape my surname—choi
is nothing if not korean, if not garlic breath,
if not seaweed & sesame & food stamps
during the lean years—could i go by f.j.c.? could i be
paper thin & raceless? dust jacket & coffee stain,
boneless rumor smoldering behind the curtain
& speaking through an ink-stained puppet?
my father ran through all his possible rechristenings—
ian, isaac, ivan—and we laughed at each one,
knowing his accent would always give him away.
you can hear the pride in my mother’s voice
when she answers the phone this is grace, & it is
some kind of strange grace she’s spun herself,
some lightning made of chain mail. grace is not
her pseudonym, though everyone in my family is a poet.
these are the shields for the names we speak in the dark
to remember our darkness. savage death rites
we still practice in the new world. myths we whisper
to each other to keep warm. my korean name
is the star my mother cooks into the jjigae
to follow home when i am lost, which is always
in this gray country, this violent foster home
whose streets are paved with shame, this factory yard
riddled with bullies ready to steal your skin
& sell it back to your mother for profit,
land where they stuff our throats with soil
& accuse us of gluttony when we learn to swallow it.
i confess. i am greedy. i think i deserve to be seen
for what i am: a boundless, burning wick.
a minor chord. i confess: if someone has looked
at my crooked spine and called it elmwood,
i’ve accepted. if someone has loved me more
for my gook name, for my saint name,
for my good vocabulary & bad joints,
i’ve welcomed them into this house.
i’ve cooked them each a meal with a star singing
at the bottom of the bowl, a secret ingredient
to follow home when we are lost:
sunflower oil, blood sausage, a name
given by your dead grandfather who eventually
forgot everything he’d touched. i promise:
i’ll never stop stealing back what’s mine.
i promise: i won’t forget again.
Franny Choi
Muslim Girlhood
I never found myself in any pink aisle. There was no box for me with glossy cellophane like heat and a neat packet of instructions in six languages. Evenings, I watched TV like a religion I moderately believed. I watched to see how the others lived, not
knowing
I was the Other, no laugh track in my living room, no tidy and
punctual
resolution waiting. I took tests in which Jane and William had so many apples, but never a friend named Khadija. I fasted through birthday parties and Christmas parties and ate leftover tajine at plastic lunch tables, picked at pepperoni from slices like blemishes and tried not to complain. I prayed at the wrong times in the wrong tongue. I hungered for Jell-O and Starbursts and margarine, could read mono- and diglycerides by five and knew what gelatin meant, where it
came from.
When I asked for anything good, like Cedar Point or slumber parties, I offered a quick Inshallah, as in Can Jordan sleep over this weekend,
Inshallah?,
peeking at my father as if he were a god. Sometimes, I thought my father was a god, I loved him that much. And the news thought this was an impossible thing—a Muslim girl who loved her father. But what did they know of my heart, or my father who drove fifty miles to buy me a doll like a Barbie because it looked like me, short brown hair underneath her hijab,
unthreatening
breasts and feet flat enough to carry her as far as she wanted to go? In my games, she traveled and didn’t marry, devoured any book she could curl her small, rigid fingers around. I called her Amira because it was a name like my sister’s, though I think her name was supposed to be Sara, that drawled A so like sorry, which she never, ever was.
Leila Chatti
Fluency
The once-monthly obligation was the phone,
a plastic conch shoved into her young palm,
static ocean carrying her English
over eight time zones to Borneo and reaching
this aunt or another with a name plucked
from the Bible, changed by accent,
laughter not needing translation
as it surfaced. She imagined this
as her mother’s revenge for supermarket corrections
on pronunciation, throat now clotted
with the tangled seaweed of words
made meaningless. She can’t blame her
for the relishing of this silence.
In the end, the girl would flee, the instrument
surrendered and an outheld hand
putting things back where they ought to be.
Michelle Brittan Rosado
Master Film
my mother around that blue porcelain,
my mother nannying around the boxed grits and just-add-water pantry
of the third richest family in Alabama,
my mother at school on Presbyterian dime and me
on my great grandmother’s lap singing
her home, my mother mostly gone
and elsewhere and wondering
about my dad, my baba, driving a cab
in Poughkeepsie, lifting lumber in Rochester, thirtysomething
and pages of albums killed,
entire rows of classrooms
disappeared, my baba drowning Bud Light by the Hudson
and listening to “Fast Car,” my baba on VHS
interviewed by a friend in New York, his hair
black as mine is now, I’m four and in Alabama, I see him
between odd jobs in different states,
and on the video our friend shows baba a picture
of me and asks how do you feel when you see Solmaz?
and baba saying turn the camera off then
turn off the camera and then
can you please look away I don’t want you to see my baba cry
Solmaz Sharif
The Key
I was under the kitchen table, guessing who was at the sink by how they used water when I heard my mother say to my father, what about this job, that one, those people, did they call? And my father said, everyone says no. I see all the doors but none of them will open. My mother said, maybe we just haven’t found the right key, I’ll go look for it. They laughed for a long time. Their toes looked at each other. Maybe they forgot the bag of keys in the crooked-mouth dresser. I lined up the keys on a windowsill, metal on metal on my fingers until they smelled like missing teeth. I looked at the best one: large cursive F, a scarlet ribbon tied to it. It had two teeth, like my baby sister. I tried the little door behind the community center. Then the big-kids
door at my school. The shed of a house with a backyard so large the family could never see me. I got grass and sand and an ignorant pebble in my shoe. Dust climbed up my pants so I could spit-spell my name on my leg when resting. I went back to our neighborhood. There was a black cloud over it while the nice neighborhood down the hill shone. A girl said our house was darkest and the first raindrops fell on it because we’re all going to hell. When I told my father he said it was “isolated” or “separated” storms. So it was true we were set apart for a punishment. The next day dozens of dead flying ants covered our patio. I took all the keys and tried all the doors in the abandoned mall. One unlocked. It was a room with white walls, floor, ceiling. White squares of wood flat or leaning in every corner. The door closed behind me and no key would work. Maybe the room would swallow me and I’d get invisible if I didn’t stop screaming but then a surprised guy, white, wearing white, opened the door. I wanted to try one more time but my keys disappeared and everyone said they were never real.
Ladan Osman
Ode to the Heart
heart let me more have pity on
—Gerard Manley Hopkins
It’s late in the day and the old school’s deserted
but the door’s unlocked. The linoleum dips
and bulges, the halls have shrunk.
And I shiver for the child
who entered that brick building,
his small face looking out
from the hood of a woolen coat.
My father told me that when he was a boy
the Jews lived on one block, Italians another.
To get home he had to pass
through the forbidden territory.
He undid his belt and swung it wildly
as he ran, wind whistling
through the buckle. Heart
be praised: you wake every morning.
You cast yourself into the streets.
Ellen Bass
The Sign in My Father’s Hands
for Frank Espada
The beer company
did not hire Blacks or Puerto Ricans,
so my father joined the picket line
Ink Knows No Borders Page 3