ICE Agents Storm My Porch

The Indiscriminate Citizenry of Earth are out to arrest my sense of being a misfit. “Open up!” they bellow, hands quiet before my door that’s only wind and juniper needles, anyway. You can’t do it, I squeak from inside. You can’t make me feel at home here in this time of siege for me and mine,mi raza. Legalized suspicion of my legitimacy is now a permanent resident in my gut. “Fruit of the prickly pear!” they swear, striding up to my table to juice me a glass of pink nectar. They’ve brought welcome baskets stuffed with proof I’m earthling. From under a gingham cover, I tug a dark feather iridescing green — cohering to “magpie” thought, to memory’s chatter, to mind. Mine. And here they have my mind translated into a slate-surfaced pond, which vibrates in the shape of a cottonwood’s autumn molt, which trees me to dirt, which soils me heat & freeze — But you’ll always be one definitive document short! I complain. Doubts can forever outstrip your geo-logic. For which they produce a lock of my natal dust, bronzed to the fluttering fiber of lacebark pine. Where’d they get that stuff? The baskets are bottomless, and it’s useless for me to insist on being distinct. Undergoing re-portation, I’m awakened to a Center, where walls between all beings are dreamt to dissolve.