poems about ICE | Alison McGhee

Poem of the Week, by Dorianne Laux

A few days ago I drove before dawn down Lake Street, the major city street that runs through south Minneapolis. It was dark. Nearly all the restaurants and bodegas and auto repair shops and gas stations were closed. But through the windows I could see the shadowy outlines of morning shift workers in the restaurant kitchens and storerooms, so many of them immigrants.

How many of them are terrified, here in this city where we have been invaded by our own government? How many of them can’t even risk coming to work, here where daily acts of vicious cruelty are making it hard to breathe?

Later that morning came the honks and whistles that mean the presence of ICE . Up and down the block people ran out, one in pajamas, all of us with our whistles and our phones. A friend texted me from an elementary school she was monitoring to make sure the kids and staff got in safely. Another stood vigil at the site of Renee Good’s murder. Later that afternoon I helped pack endless boxes of food for people who don’t have enough.

That night a friend texted me from the parking lot of a Mexican restaurant he was monitoring to make sure staff got home safe. And yesterday, so many thousands of Minneapolitans braved -11 degree weather to march in peaceful protest. All of us doing what we can, because we can, for the sake of strangers: human beings just like us.

For the Sake of Strangers, by Dorianne Laux

No matter what the grief, its weight,
we are obliged to carry it.
We rise and gather momentum, the dull strength
that pushes us through crowds.
And then the young boy gives me directions
so avidly. A woman holds the glass door open,
waits patiently for my empty body to pass through.
All day it continues, each kindness
reaching toward another – a stranger
singing to no one as I pass on the path, trees
offering their blossoms, a child
who lifts his almond eyes and smiles.
Somehow they always find me, seem even
to be waiting, determined to keep me
from myself, from the thing that calls to me
as it must have once called to them –
this temptation to step off the edge
and fall weightless, away from the world.

Click here for more information about Dorianne Laux, one of my favorite poets. Today’s poem first appeared in For the Sake of Strangers, publish in 1994 by BOA Editions.

alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter

Poem of the Week, by Alison McGhee

Posted on 15 Days Ago by alisonmcghee

ICE was on my block yesterday, masked young men with guns driving large vehicles the wrong way up our one-way street. Picture them as a baby, Alison, I tell myself. Picture them being bullied. Picture a parent being cruel to them. Picture them as a small, lonely, scared child. This little routine is my secret weapon for combatting hatred in my own heart, a tried and true way to create empathy. These days, my secret weapon is getting lots of play. It usually works. But not always.

Questionnaire, by Alison McGhee

Where were you when you made the decision to sign
up for ICE?
When you signed the contract, did you picture your
brown niece, the one you taught to skateboard?
Are you picturing her now, as you pull the mask up to
your eyes?
When you think of your great-grandmother as a child,
fleeing the pogroms for life on the Lower East Side,
do you remember how hard she worked?
How young she died?
When you think of your brown niece on the
skateboard you taught her to ride, do you
picture someone with a mask
pulling her off it and zip-tying
her hands?

Where in your body do you feel whatever it is you feel
when you remember the day your brown now-
skateboarding infant niece came home from the
hospital with your sister and her brown husband and
they put her in your arms?
When you think of your brother-in-law now, that
brown man who taught you to play chess and
helped you night after night with your math homework
those years you lived with your sister and him because
your father kept slamming you against the wall, do you
picture someone in a mask yanking him from his car and
slamming him to the ground?
What do you plan to do with your $50,000 signing bonus?
How many masks do you have at home?
How often do you wash them?
Do any of them have blood spots?
How much does a mask cost?

A version of today’s poem will appear in the anthology THE COUNTRY IN THE MIRROR: Poems of Protest and Witness, to be published this year by Rootstock Publisher.
alisonmcghee.com
My podcast: Words by Winter