Work-in-progress

I was thinking today about the connection between domestic violence and state violence, about violence that comes from desperation and the enforced poverty of our economic system. I was thinking about what role choice plays in violence and whether coercion itself is a form of violence. I was thinking about my relationship with my mother and her relationship with the military, about dependency and abuse, about my past...

Here is a poem I started a while ago but that still isn't finished. I want it to be better- clearer, more direct, more personal. But details are hard these days. I'm working on it.


I tried to write you a letter today
The pen, tossing and turning,
Bold typeface grasping and yearning,
For words that might makes sense
Against the backdrop of our estrangement
Against the space and time we don’t know our way through
Against the walls laid over bricks and years
Mortar bound in custom granite, tears
Mortar rounds in children’s ears
Sound like each time the streets reverberate with
An invocation to bring wars home
landing too close to the home I never had
In the seventeen year old signature
that was desperate enough to exchange twenty years
for security, poor medical care and a pension.
In the throbbing veins of his neck synchronizing
With his grip pressing me firmly against the wall
As spit shrapnel bombarded my face.
In the smoke-glazed eyes that couldn’t find
the courage to soften for your daughter
once in twenty years and counting.
You’d think I would have learned how to write to you
During the absences that permeated my childhood
with the stale bitterness of sea salt and engine oil
Fermented over the six months you lived on
Meclazine* and the conviction that you were better
than those Dirty, poor people.
How much anger can I write away or leave behind
Like not-so hidden mines
Exposed partially but fully loaded?

*Naval generic of sea sickness medication

Memory: Undocumented Grief

In honor of May Day, this is dedicated to all the people working too hard, too long, and too far away from their families.

My aunt was an undocumented worker, a Honduran who had traveled months cutting through the wildness of the jungle with a machete, through the waves in barely floatable canoe, only to end-up working for minimum wage in a North Carolinian bacon plant. She spent more than 5 years there working 12 to 14 hours days before she began exhibiting back problems and carpetunnel. Despite her fear of deportation, she appealed to her boss for help. He told her healthcare was out of the question and transferred her to a different job in the plant.
She met my uncle, a truck driver from a small town, an alcoholic from an abusive family. He humiliated her in front of his family, isolated her from the immigrant community, married her in order to get her a green card. The family wasn’t terribly fond of her kind, but he needed someone, they would reason.

One day Maria came to visit. She had always been pleasant, but it was the first time I had ever seen her with her eyes lit up. She told us her and my uncle had been trying to have a child. She was pregnant.

The silence in the room betrayed our reservations about her joy. Everyone congratulated her. Tension filled the room as she told the family the names she was thinking of—Jose, Rafael, Carlos,. “Why not something more biblical?” They nudged her towards more anglicized names. Afterall, why mark the poor kid?

Maria woke in the middle of the night with severe back pains and had to be rushed to the hospital. The doctors gave her an ultimatum: she would either have to be bedridden for the remaining 8 months of her pregnancy or have an abortion. Maybe she was catholic. Maybe her husband wanted an ere. I didn’t understand her decision.

What I didn’t know was that even though Yentsee had been an American citizen for five years by virtue of marriage, she couldn’t bring her daughter to come live with her. She had left Isabella a toddler in her parent’s care when she set off to make her way into America. “You don’t understand how dangerous it was. How dangerous it still is.” Is the only clip I remember from the conversation I didn’t know how to have.

She couldn’t explain how she had met the working-class southern boy she had married. She couldn’t risk going back and being found out. She was stuck in one country with her daughter in another. They were worlds away without enough of a paper trail to fill the gap.