This is for anyone who feels alone out there right now.
I walk into the morgue, the mortician presents my country splayed across a table.
Asks me to identify the body, I do not recognize it.
It’s an emaciated form, dimmed by a death I did not prepare for. And I did not expect losing my culture to feel like this.
This cadaver I dared to call an identity, once had the belief that I could call home, at the tip of my tongue and the breath of my appetite and the weight of my memories. I only recognize my country in photographs, in tour books, in sepia. Not in living colour. Not in the seat of surrender.
My stomach filled me first, gripping down on process food.
The bite of bile and my disobedient tongue, my ears followed, an ember of my grandfathers voice, afraid the swift hush of wind over desert sand. And force fed me this borrowed language,.there’s something about the taste of assimilation that makes you want to get back in the boat.
I think of home, I think of home each time the bank asks me if i want to go paperless. Don’t they know that people of colour have been doing that since before plymouths rock, since underground railroad, since my uncle is turning the house into a refugee camp? Don’t they know red, white and blue like stand your grand, like hate crimes? Like shoot to kill. Only stars I see are when the cops roll in and they take my neighborhood. My family, undocumented. The only stripes I see chain us to this prison of an existence.
I find myself talking to people who cross borders, more each day . I find myself crying for their countries too, this massacre, this wilted flower field of gutted nation this melting pot. The smell to god, disemboweled american dream.
If you hate it so much then why are you here?
Because sometimes, the buildings collapse, but the rubble keeps bleeding. Because sometimes your blood is the only thing you can carry with you. Because sometimes the water is more inviting than where you stand.
That’s how you end up with those kids washed up on foreign soil and that’s only talking about the ones that made it.
Do you know what its like to escape genocide only to be gunned down in your own home? Don’t you know that they’re finishing the wars that our dictators started? Since they handed me my death certificates.
No.
The certificate of naturalization.
I’ve been seeing ghosts, mostly in the mirror, at the dinner table, at the family picnic. We were naive enough to believe that we call home in here without anyone having to leave.
I met the president, sat with him at a table too small to hold all the things that brought us there.
His hands resting, where are your chains?
They told me your hands were tied. When they sent those kids back? When they wouldn’t take the refugees? When they closed down the borders but not guantano?
Mr president, why do they call it the land of free, when even the dead can’t leave?
Mr president, mr president, what does one caged bird say to another?
I couldn’t hear him, over the sound of the corpse lying between us.
He looked at me as if he thought I were afraid.
Doesn’t he know that back home, the woman take care of the bodies?
We celebrate Gay Pride all year long. But this year, we’re doing some special programing for a large-scale campaign #LoveEqually. We’re looking for both sponsors and contributors. Check it out! https://t.co/tkraXFPxLL pic.twitter.com/X2FlBEZb8Y
— The Good Men Project (@GoodMenProject) March 11, 2019