95 Immigration poems

Salvador, if I return on a summer day, so humid my thumb will clean your beard of  salt, and if  I touch your volcanic face, kiss your pumice breath, please don’t let cops say:he’s gangster. Don’t let gangsters say:he’s wrong barrio. Your barrios stain you with pollen, red liquid pollen. Every day cops and gangsters pick at you with their metallic beaks, and presidents, guilty. Dad swears he’ll never return, Mom wants to see her mom, and in the news: every day black bags, more and more of us leave. Parents say: don’t go; you have tattoos. It’s the law; you don’t know what law means there. ¿But what do they know? We don’t have greencards. Grandparents say:nothing happens here. Cousin says:here, it’s worse. Don’t come, you could be... Stupid Salvador, you see our black bags, our empty homes, our fear to say:the war has never stopped, and still you lie and say:I’m fine, I’m fine, but if  I don’t brush Abuelita’s hair, wash her pots and pans, I cry. Like tonight, when I wish you made it easier to love you, Salvador. Make it easier to never have to risk our lives.

As the dead, so I come to the city I am of. Am without. To watch play out around me as theater — audience as the dead are audience to the life that is not mine. Is as not as never. Turning down Shiraz’s streets it turns out to be such a faraway thing. A without which I have learned to be. From bed, I hear a man in the alley selling something, no longer by mule and holler but by bullhorn and jalopy. How to say what he is selling — it is no thing this language thought worth naming. No thing I have used before. It is his life I don’t see daily. Not theater. Not play. Though I remain only audience. It is a thing he must sell daily and every day he peddles this thing: a without which I cannot name. Without which is my life.

for Kwame Dawes Your scuttled pays floats—fiery—in the ether; Blazing, it vomits smudge-smoke. Your mind chars Black because you yaw—moth-like—too near flames. You douse your dream-scorched brain with slave-sweat rum— The only gold you can own, corroding Your liver. Your anthem plays to gunfire. When you think about it (when you can breathe)— After all the lies that frame nostalgia, All the dead faces that occupy photographs, All the slain lovers pitched into ditches, Your eyes itch and ache with water, then dry— Curling like dead leaves, starving for gold fire.

These hills are sandy. Trees are dwarfed here. Crows Caw dismally in skies of an arid brilliance, Complain in dusty pine-trees. Yellow daybreak Lights on the long brown slopes a frost-like dew, Dew as heavy as rain; the rabbit tracks Show sharply in it, as they might in snow. But it’s soon gone in the sun—what good does it do? The houses, on the slope, or among brown trees, Are grey and shrivelled. And the men who live here Are small and withered, spider-like, with large eyes. Bring water with you if you come to live here— Cold tinkling cisterns, or else wells so deep That one looks down to Ganges or Himalayas. Yes, and bring mountains with you, white, moon-bearing, Mountains of ice. You will have need of these Profundities and peaks of wet and cold. Bring also, in a cage of wire or osier, Birds of a golden colour, who will sing Of leaves that do not wither, watery fruits That heavily hang on long melodious boughs In the blue-silver forests of deep valleys. I have now been here—how many years? Years unnumbered. My hands grow clawlike. My eyes are large and starved. I brought no bird with me, I have no cistern Where I might find the moon, or river, or snow. Some day, for lack of these, I’ll spin a web Between two dusty pine-tree tops, and hang there Face downward, like a spider, blown as lightly As ghost of leaf. Crows will caw about me. Morning and evening I shall drink the dew.

and I heard an unending scream piercing nature. —from the diary of Edvard Munch , 1892 At the greyhound bus stations, at airports, at silent wharfs the bodies exit the crafts. Women, men, children; cast out from the new paradise. They are not there in the homeland, in Argentina, not there in Santiago, Chile; never there in Montevideo, Uruguay, and they are not here in America They are in exile: a slow scream across a yellow bridge the jaws stretched, widening, the eyes multiplied into blood orbits, torn, whirling, spilling between two slopes; the sea, black, swallowing all prayers, shadeless. Only tall faceless figures of pain flutter across the bridge. They pace in charred suits, the hands lift, point and ache and fly at sunset as cold dark birds. They will hover over the dead ones: a family shattered by military, buried by hunger, asleep now with the eyes burning echoes calling Joaquín, María, Andrea, Joaquín, Joaquín, Andrea en exilio From here we see them, we the ones from here, not there or across, only here, without the bridge, without the arms as blue liquid quenching the secret thirst of unmarked graves, without our flesh journeying refuge or pilgrimage; not passengers on imaginary ships sailing between reef and sky, we that die here awake on Harrison Street, on Excelsior Avenue clutching the tenderness of chrome radios, whispering to the saints in supermarkets, motionless in the chasm of playgrounds, searching at 9 a.m. from our third floor cells, bowing mute, shoving the curtains with trembling speckled brown hands. Alone, we look out to the wires, the summer, to the newspaper wound in knots as matches for tenements. We that look out from our miniature vestibules, peering out from our old clothes, the father's well-sewn plaid shirt pocket, an old woman's oversized wool sweater peering out from the makeshift kitchen. We peer out to the streets, to the parades, we the ones from here not there or across, from here, only here. Where is our exile? Who has taken it?

INS officers raided a building, taking twelve illegal aliens into custody. The owner was cited for employing workers without proper identification. 1. RAID Ernesto’s boot heels are wild hooves Being roped in, left bound in the air. Carmen, slow-footed, nauseous with child, Fights them off by swinging her purse. “Pinche cabrones saben hablar español Cuando nos van a arrestar,” she says As her voice is drowned out by a row Of washing machines on their rinse cycle. Like a cat spooked out of a trash bin, Sal runs into the street. Chorus: ¡Chingado! 2. A GIRL AND HER FATHER We were driving through town, Mama, Right by where people pick up the bus When this man jumps out right in front of us. Dad hit the brakes. His eyes got this big, Mama. He was running from the law, that’s for sure. Just be glad no one got hurt, mija. Try not to think about it anymore, mija. We won’t go that way again, that’s for sure. 3. THE FACTORY Two of the old-timers talked about unions: “A trabajar, porque hablar de las uniones Sólo trae la migra de nuevo.” 4. A YOUNG MOTHER Can you imagine how many diapers We went through with the twins? The disposable ones were way too expensive, So we switched to cloth. They were great. No, We didn’t wash them. Thank God, we had a service. We just put the dirty ones in plastic bags, And they picked them up and dropped off clean ones Right on our porch every two weeks. It made things so much easier. And you know, We didn’t have to worry about those summer rashes Because their little bottoms could breathe better. If you can afford the service, just do it. Or at least do it for the first six months. It’s even good for the environment. 5. JEFE No son gallinas Esperando un huevo. ¡A trabajar! Chorus: ¡Chingado!

It is not like going to the bank. There are no hard candies in a basket made in China, and no Kleenexes on the counter. There is no refund if someone forgets to wish you a good day. There are no chairs for the aged, no toys for two-year-olds with earaches, no supervisor to speak to in case of the Absurd. There are no meal vouchers if it takes all day, no list of local hotels with a negotiated rate. No one wants to know if you are a doctor. Plastic is not magic. Seals are not signs. Your cousin-brother’s wedding is not relevant. Hell, there is no such thing as a cousin-brother. And it is always your fault: not enough planning, the wrong color passport, the misplaced stress in a word.

Conchita debemos to speak totalmente in English cuando we go into Sears okay      Por qué Porque didn’t you hear lo que pasó      It say on the eleven o’clock news anoche que two robbers was caught in Sears and now this is the part I’m not completely segura que I got everything porque channel 2 tiene tú sabes that big fat guy that’s hard to understand porque his nose sit on his lip like a elefante pues the point es que the robbers the police say was two young men pretty big y one have a hairy face and the other is calvo that’s right he’s baldy and okay believe me qué barbaridad porque Hairy Face and Mister Baldy goes right into the underwear department takes all the money from the caja yeah uh-huh the cash register and mira Mister Baldy goes to this poor Italian woman that I guess would be like us sixty o sixty-five who is in the section of the back-support brassieres and he makes her put a big bra over her head para que she can’t see nothing and kneel like she’s talking to God to save her poor life and other things horrible pero the point como dije es que there was two of them and both was speaking Spanish y por eso is a good thing Conchita so the people at Sears don’t confuse us with Hairy and Baldy that we speak English only okay ready Oh what a nice day to be aquí en Sears Miss Conception

At Pearl Street station, two brown-skinned men in painter’s pants stand out in a sea of white I am just one more face sticking out in a crowd & it is my privilege that prevents me from understanding why the workers want to know how to buy one-way trips the automated machine sells only one roundtrip fee, back to where you came from he isn’t asking me for change says it clear enough so that there can be no mistake Sí. Yo sé. But a dollar fifty is a lot of money.

coolie naam dharaiya ham tej pakare jaisan chhuri kate hamke Guyana mein aike