POETRY, PROSE AND SHORT FICTION FOR CREATIVITY-BASED CURRICULUM GUIDEBOOK ON IMMIGRATION “Just as when I started writing poetry, we’re at a very crucial time in American history and in planetary history…Poetry is a way to bridge, to make bridges from one country to another, one person to another, one time to another.” -Joy Harjo (2019, June 6)

Javier Zamora …………………………………………………………………………. 2/290

Naomi Shihab Nye (excerpts from interview with Krista Tippett) ………………..….. 3/291

Justen Ahren (poetry, photos, stories from refugees in Levos, Greece) ………………. 8/296

Joanna Wróblewska (poetry and stories from refugees in Europe) ………………….. 19/307

Elizabeth McKim …………………………………………………………………….. 20/308

Meg Braley …………………………………………………………………………… 21/309

M. Soledad Caballero …………………………………………………………………. 23/311

Elexia Alleyne………………………………………………………………………… 24/312

Camille T. Dungy …………………………………………………………………….. 25/313

Hieu Minh Nguyen …………………………………………………………………… 26/314

Scott Ruescher ……………………………………………………………………….. 27/315

Ifrah Mansour …………………………………………………………………………..30/318

Sally Wen Mao ……………………………………………………………………….. 32/320 Courtesy of Split This Rock’s The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database

Odette Amaranta Vélez Valcárcel ……………………………………………………. 33/321 (Thoughts on Poetic Sensibility) In Spanish and English

María Cristina Rojas …………………………………………………………………… 36/324 (thoughts on language and teaching through poetry) Women and Children in Detention Trilogy Nightmares and Dreams: Immigrant Voices from Inside Detention Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………………. 37/325 Leaving Home - Guatemala (Narrative in English) …………………………………. 38/326 The Lucky One/ Afortunada – El Salvador (Narrative in English) ………………….. 39/327 The Lucky One/ Afortunada – El Salvador (Play in English) ………………………… 41/329 The Final Goodbye – Honduras (Narrative in English) ………………………………. 43/331 The Final Goodbye – Honduras (Play in English with some Spanish) ………………. 44/333

1 Javier Zamora Courtesy of the author from his book Unaccompanied

from: The Book I Made with a Counselor My First Week of School

His grandma made the best pupusas, the counselor wrote next to Stick-Figure Abuelita (I’d colored her puffy hair black with a pen).

Earlier, Dad in his truck: “always look gringos in the eyes.” Mom: “never tell them everything, but smile, always smile.”

A handful of times I’ve opened the book to see running past cacti, from helicopters, running inside detention cells.

Next to what might be yucca plants or a dried creek: Javier saw a dead coyote animal, which stank and had flies over it.

I keep this book in an old shoebox underneath the bed. She asked in Spanish, I just smiled, didn’t tell her, no animal, I knew that man.

Javier Zamora was born in La Herradura, El Salvador in 1990. His father fled El Salvador when he was a year old; and his mother when he was about to turn five. Both parents' migrations were caused by the US-funded Salvadoran Civil War (1980-1992). In 1999, Javier migrated through Guatemala, Mexico, and eventually the Sonoran Desert. Before a coyote abandoned his group in Oaxaca, Javier managed to make it to Arizona with the aid of other migrants. His first full-length collection, Unaccompanied (Copper Canyon Press, September 2017), explores how immigration and the civil war have impacted his family. Zamora holds many fellowships and awards including for his work in the Undocupoets Campaign. See: http://www.javierzamora.net/; http://www.splitthisrock.org/poetry-database/poem/from-the-book-i-made; https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/javier-zamora; https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/an-immigrant-who-crossed-the-border-as-a- child-retraces-his-journey-in-poems

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2 Naomi Shihab Nye The following poems are offered with permission from the poet and referenced in an interview (excerpts below) of Krista Tippett’s conversation with Naomi Shihab Nye courtesy of On Being podcast https://onbeing.org/programs/naomi-shihab-nye-your-life-is-a-poem-mar2018/

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say It is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend.

3 Two Countries

Skin remembers how long the years grow when skin is not touched, a gray tunnel of singleness, feather lost from the tail of a bird, swirling onto a step, swept away by someone who never saw it was a feather. Skin ate, walked, slept by itself, knew how to raise a see-you-later hand. But skin felt it was never seen, never known as a land on the map, nose like a city, hip like a city, gleaming dome of the mosque and the hundred corridors of cinnamon and rope.

Skin had hope, that's what skin does. Heals over the scarred place, makes a road. Love means you breathe in two countries. And skin remembers — silk, spiny grass, deep in the pocket that is skin's secret own. Even now, when skin is not alone, it remembers being alone and thanks something larger that there are travelers, that people go places larger than themselves.

Refugee Not Always (spoken https://onbeing.org/blog/refugee-not-always/)

Refugee not always once a confident schoolboy strolling Jerusalem streets He knew the alleyways spoke to stones All his life he would pick up stones and pocket them On some he drew faces What do we say in the wake of one who was always homesick? Are you home now? Is Palestine peaceful in some dimension we can't see? Do Jews and Arabs share the table? Is holy in the middle?

Cross That Line

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Paul Robeson stood on the northern border of the USA and sang into Canada where a vast audience sat on folding chairs waiting to hear him. He sang into Canada. His voice left the USA when his body was not allowed to cross that line. Remind us again, brave friend. What countries may we sing into? What lines should we all be crossing? What songs travel toward us from far away to deepen our days?

Below are excerpts of Krista Tippett's conversation with poet Naomi Shihab Nye: (7/28/16) Life is a Poem interview with poet Naomi Shihab Nye https://onbeing.org/programs/naomi-shihab- nye-your-life-is-a-poem/

Naomi Shihab Nye: Very rarely do you hear anyone say they write things down and feel worse. It's an act that helps you, preserves you, energizes you in the very doing of it.

Krista Tippett, host: “You are living in a poem.” This is how the poet Naomi Shihab Nye sees the world, and she teaches how this way of being and writing is possible. She has engaged the real-world power of words since her upbringing between her father’s Palestinian homeland and Ferguson, Missouri, near where her American mother grew up. Her father was a refugee journalist, and she carries forward his hopeful passion, his insistence that language must be a way out of cycles of animosity. A poem she wrote, called “Kindness,” is carried around in the pockets and memories of readers around the world. [see Kindness above]

… Ms. Tippett: … [W]hat is poetry? What’s poetry’s place? It seems like one of the things you draw out is just noticing, paying a different kind of attention to things that are not quite as apparent to the eye, starting with … “Please Describe How You Became A Writer.”

…Ms. Shihab Nye: It’s very short. [laughs] “Please Describe How You Became A Writer” —

“Possibly I began writing as a refuge from our insulting first-grade textbook. Come, Jane, come. Look, Dick, look. Were there ever duller people in the world? You had to tell them to look at things? Why weren’t they looking to begin with?” [see Two Countries above]

5 … Ms. Shihab Nye: Last week, I was in a classroom in Austin, Texas, where a girl who was apparently going through a really rough spell at home wrote a poem that was definitely tragic and comic, both, about — everybody was yelling at her in the poem, from all directions. She was just kind of suffering in her home place and trying to find peace, trying to find a place to do her homework. But she wrote this in such a compelling way that when she read it — and read it with gusto and joy; there was such joyousness in her voice, even though she was describing something that sounded awful — when she finished, the girls in her classroom just broke into wild applause. And I saw her face. She lit up. And she said, "Man, I feel better." …[T]his is such a graphic example of putting words on the page. That feeling of being connected to someone else, when you allow yourself to be very particular, is another mystery of writing.

… Ms. Tippett: I was looking at A Maze Me, this book that you did — Poems for Girls — which actually echoes what you just said. You say, “If you have many voices and let them speak to one another in a friendly fashion, if you’re not too proud to talk to yourself out loud, if you will ask the questions pressing against your forehead from the inside, you’ll be OK. If you write three lines down in a notebook every day” — and then, in parentheses, “they don’t have to be great or important, they don’t have to relate to one another, you don’t have to show them to anyone” — “you will find out what you notice. Uncanny connections will be made visible to you. That’s what I started learning when I was 12, and I never stopped learning it.”

Ms. Shihab Nye: Right. And I think many people are encouraged to think you could write that little and still gain something from it; that you don’t have to be spending an hour and a half to three hours to five hours a day writing, to have a meaningful experience with it. It’s a very immediate experience. You can sit down and write three sentences — how long does that take? Three minutes, five minutes — and be giving yourself a very rare gift of listening to yourself, just finding out, when you go back and look at what you wrote…

…Ms. Tippett: …I want to touch a little bit on your father again, just on this matter of refugees, which is so resonant now in the world… in a new, desperate way. There’s something in me that feels like we’re kind of — it’s happening — especially if you’re in America, it’s happening “over there," kind of. But I wonder if, when people look back 100 years from now, if we’re still around, if this won’t be the thing that was changing the world, that’s going to shape the rest of the century. First of all, there’s the opening page of Transfer, where you’re dedicating the book to your father, but you — the passage that starts, “Refugee, not always.”

Ms. Shihab Nye: [see Refugee Not Always above] And I think, many times the way immigrants — people look at immigrants with such a sense of diminishment: as if this person is less than I am, because they’ve left their country. Well, I actually think they’re more than we are, because they’re braver. They’ve gone some other place. They have to operate in another language. How easy would that be? If I had to go to China today and start living in China and doing everything in Chinese, it would be very, very hard. So you think about the bravery of these people and the desperation with which they’re trying to find a realm of safety for their families and — just the basic safeties that we take for granted every day we get up.

6 And I don’t know; I don’t know how a world with so many resources and so many religious traditions and good hopes — how we can keep doing these things to one another in the world that create refugee populations. It just seems outrageous. Why is that happening so much?

Ms. Tippett: … Here’s just some lines from another — the “History” poem in that book, Transfer. “We were born to wander, to grieve, / lost lineage. What we did to one another / on a planet so wide open for doing.”

Ms. Shihab Nye: So wide open, so much we could do, always; so many surprising moves a person, a country could make that might be imaginative, that might encourage positive behavior instead of negative.

…Ms. Tippett: So your Palestinian refugee father — you say — and this comes through over and over again — but as you wrote about him after he died, you say: “He loved the world. The world frustrated him endlessly, but he loved it, and he hoped for it.” There’s this beautiful line, “He never gave up hope. Everything depended on mutual respect. The sadness of my father was a land mass under water.”

…Ms. Tippett: Naomi Shihab Nye’s books include 19 Varieties of Gazelle, You & Yours, Words Under the Words, and A Maze Me: Poems for Girls. Her newest book is Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners.

Naomi Shihab Nye, poet, essayist, anthologist, is the author of more than thirty books of poetry and prose for adults, children and YA readers. She has received many honors, awards and writing fellowships. Poets.org states, “Nye gives voice to her experience as an Arab-American through poems about heritage and peace that overflow with a humanitarian spirit.” (see video https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/video-naomi-shihab-nye-inspiration)

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7 Justen Ahren poetry, photos, stories from refugees in Levos, Greece

In 2018, I volunteered on Lesvos, Greece working with refugees who have come to Europe from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, and other Middle East and African countries.

In 2015 and 2016, an average of 500,000 people entered Europe through Greece. While the numbers have fallen off since 2016, still some 40,000 people have attempted to enter Greece by boat in the past year.

The stories of how and why people left their homes and risked a dangerous ocean crossing are stories of displacement, survival, and hope. Most are fleeing violence. They want what any of us would want: to be secure, to work, to raise our families.

As an artist I try to bear witness and then create something moving out of what I see and the stories I hear. I want to move my audience to feel their own displacement in order to create empathy in them for others. image 1: graffiti outside Moria Camp, Lesvos, Greece.

image 2: 40,000 Life Jackets, Life Jacket graveyard, Molyvos, Greece

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image 3: warehouse for donations of clothing for refugees, Moria, Greece.

9 Stories:

Haya's Story (43-year-old Syrian woman. Mother of four. Excerpt from conversation at Shower Power, March 21, 2018)

“Let me help! Please. Let me do the dishes. Or wash the towels. Scrub the tub and the shower. Give me something to do. Something I used to do. Something I’ve done my whole life.

The dishes, the laundry. I can’t stand in front of my students again. I have no classroom in which to teach. You miss the work you’ve when it is gone. You miss the mundane, the routine. The scrubbing, the washing, the hanging out to dry.

A blue evening like this one when the soldier came. Everyone was quiet at first then we lied about our neighbors for bread and shoes you do what your must. I remember a fat housefly tapped the window on a blue evening like this one. The cello in the corner missing its strings. After supper, my husband I walked by the river beneath the pear trees about to flower. men fish from a blackened bridge, women gather firewood from the banks. there are rumors of war, footsteps the approaching notes of occupation. A blue evening like this one when the soldiers have came we forgot happiness we forgot the pears hurling their petals on tanks in the street.

I was a professor at the university. My husband and I had a good life.

A good middle-class life. We had a home in a good neighborhood. We had four children, careers and two cars. We were blessed. Thanks Allah

When the war came, there was little food and during the winter hunger dug deeper. My husband and I were fired for our “political leanings.” Every day we stood in line for bread. We had to walk around the areas the soldiers patrolled. My husband was often harassed and interrogated,

10 who was he fighting for, if not them. Who did he support. It was dangerous to go out. Sometimes the soldiers would shoot for no reason

Snow falling through the hole in the roof. With the last spindles of the stairs I make a small fire.

If I could give my children a cup of tea instead of butcher’s paper boiled potatoes and cabbage

Instead of balled receipts scavenged from the floor of the train from which they suck the blue citrus ink, if I could give them pears and sit with them under the tree, and in the sunshine, eat.

My husband was killed last year when a bomb hit the local market. I found a wheelbarrow in the street and loaded with our suitcases and belongings, and we left. The children took turns riding in it while I pushed.

In Public Shelter #25, four hundred and eight people thrown down. On their cheeks and eyelashes the bomb fell, on each rememberer who can remember a kiss placed somewhere on their skin. Who can remember a number of mornings sitting at a kitchen table, eating a bowl of dates, each a shadow now killed by someone they don’t know someone they’ve never seen and can’t ask why he is in the sky and they are on the ground in Public Shelter #25, nursing an infant, touching a belly waiting for the unborn child to kick.

One moment they are talking, praying. One moment they are tying their shoes.

I made it to Moria with all four children. But things are not better here. I was raped by a guard in the shower my first week here.

11 Today is the first shower I've taken since. It's been seven weeks.

A few weeks ago I began feeling to sick. I got a pregnancy test. I am pregnant with the child of the man who raped me. I don’t want it. But it is a sin. Isn't it also a sin too not love a child. And how could I love that face and what I'd see in it? Violence and my disgrace.

What should I do? What can I do? I have four children who need me.

So, please, let me help. Let me do one thing I used to do.

Alma’s Story Room 2 (26-year-old Syrian woman interviewed at Home for All, March 18, 2018)

My words sow me to the land. I don’t know if I am good but I’m beginning to understand the violence I’ve been given the lies I’ve agreed to share the gestures of the dead the objects they’ve handled and have broken with their labors and affections— for this world I try to articulate how their fingers wore handles of shovels and footsteps ground paths from small rooms to river crossings to stations where we pray we will see again those we are missing: the lives staggering like flames and leaning away. I’ve been given to weep for them.

Though it’s no longer safe I don’t want to leave them words only daydreams, but what their bodies have trapped

12 their own private trees.

I was a student of English Literature at the University of Damascus. Damascus: beautiful sounding in its distance. I still can hear the boulevard alive birds in the morning before the traffic, then the mortar shells and concrete collapsing. Alarms sirens.

My father wanted me to leave Syria when the war was starting but I wanted to finish my studies. I never believed war would come to the city, let alone our neighborhood. I begged him to let me stay. By the time I graduated, the travel was dangerous, transportation had been shut down by bombings and fighting. Roads were blocked. But we couldn’t stay. War made it impossible.

My mother, sister, and I left last October, in the middle of the night we set out. Each of us brought one suitcase. What we could carry. We walked for several days, and managed to cross into Turkey.

I begin to work from memory three figures me, my mother, and my sister walking along the border at night torches moving against the barbed wire.

I can’t help us though I try, in my memory

I make us go faster to be past the terror the border, the crossing, the ocean, but I only succeed in stripping us to matchsticks standing in the rain, elongations, I’ve made more lonely. I love the English poets, especially Yeats. How they express themselves. We do not have so many ways to say beautiful things. I learned from them how to find the beauty that is locked inside.

13 I’ve been on Lesvos for 5 months, living in a tent inside Moria. It is cold here and…I can’t describe the filth and horror of it. We wear diapers so we don’t have to use the bathrooms. So many women are assaulted.

I got asylum last month, but my mother and sister have not. I won’t leave them. I have lost too much already, and my mother suffers here. Her hands flutter to her face and her lap and against her body. With nothing to do, she worries for my father. She worries about us. She can’t sleep. She hardly eats.

I have poetry. This keeps me sane. It is my home. It is a place I can go to. I don’t write about what has happened to us. I don’t write about Moria. I won’t bring that violence to poetry’s pure room. How could I survive if I wrote there is no love here? I couldn’t that is why I write only love poems. Only poems of about love. of my father, and of Damascus I write, and to my future self I tell her its all alright. And to God, I write praising his love. This is how I survive.

Yeats said, “Happiness depends on our energy to assume the mask of some other life, on a rebirth as something not one’s self. “

Here, I must try some other mask, one that allows me to exercise love, or love will die. And if love dies, I’m lost.

Hussan’s Story (15-year-old unaccompanied Afghani teen. Excerpt from conversation at Home for All, March 21, 2018 mixed with poetry created from stories)

I walked for 11 days from my village. From my family. Each step a chasm between us.

I had never seen the ocean. How would I know it when it. 11 days I walked from my small village to get a bus.

The oldest of four, my parents sent me. They saved and sent me. It is up to me to make it to Europe or all they’ve done is for nothing and the 3400 kilometers I’ve traveled is for nothing.

I met two other boys my age. Amir, 14, and Hussein, 16. We traveled together. We prayed together. Like brothers. We slept beside the road and in ditches. We shared our food. We shared our stories. War, hunger.

We stood on chairs and ate all the leaves from the trees in the street. Yes. We burned our doors tables, finally, the stairs to keep warm, yes. We couldn’t go to school. yes dogs picked over bodies laying in the streets for days.

When we went out again, the soldiers aimed rifles at our buttons. yes They took our coats. Fog lived in the cold

14 shadow of the mountain. We were forced to fight. Hunger forced us to take sides though the body was mute for want of food even when it was dying.

We couldn’t escape. They hung those who tried from poles and stole the dead’s shoes.

You must be pure, they said. You must not think you haven’t seen your family for a long time, you must not think about that about what has happened.

A bus took me to Tehran, and to the border of Turkey where I hired a smuggler to drive me to Istanbul. We drove at night, and slept during the days. For three nights. The driver drove very fast, 160 kilometers an hour. Six of us in the car not including the driver.

In Istanbul, we took a bus to Ayvalik, where smugglers were waiting on the beach with a raft. The first time I tried to cross, I was detained by police. At the police station, they ask everyone where they are from. who is Iraqi? Step forward. 5 Iraqis show their papers and are taken away. Afghani? Step forward. Amir goes forward before we can stop him with others and is lead away.

There is talking, languages the police don’t understand, only Syrians are allowed to pass, say you are Syrian. We throw our documents in the trash. When the police ask where we are from, we say, ‘we are Syrian. When they say where are your papers we say we have lost them.

A body in the street a child’s, naked slender body, charred like the trunk of a tree limbless almost to the top. People gather around immobilized as if in a downpour they stand that close and are made that thin

15 seeking refuge in their bodies. Belonging to what these threads, held upright beginning to walk again as though learning how to make it go on? The guards at Moria take our shoes so we won’t run away

When I saw the ocean for the first time, I couldn’t breathe. The size and the weight of it. And the sound it made lurching and dragging the shore under it. The suck and pull taking rocks and sand down and laying on top of them and filled them with itself.

1 am. 62 of us boarded the small boat: 31 children, 23 men, 8 women. The smugglers pick me to be captain. They showed me how to start the engine, quickly how to steer. They point into the dark over the sound of the ocean to a line of lights on the horizon and told me to steer for those. The airport on Lesvos. They say people will be waiting for us there.

I had never been in a boat. The new moon, all was dark. We are just beyond the waves when the engine dies. People start crying yelling. We are scared and already wet. Water is coming in over the front and sides. There are too many of us in the boat. I restart the engine after a few panicked pulls, and we begin again towards the lights. Which sometimes are swallowed by the ocean. It is dark.

We were a Light on the ocean. Brief. Flickering. And the small engine carrying us over the dark waves is our heart. A light on the ocean. The putt putt of an engine. Wet through our clothes and cold. 4 hours at sea, we are halfway, maybe a little more. It is so cold we want to sleep. But on the boat you can’t fall asleep or you could fall over board. But a young girl, a child, does. She falls into the water and is swallowed.

There is screaming and I try to circle back but men are yelling at me not to go back. We might run out of gas. And others are yelling in other languages, gesturing to go back, and the mother is held in the boat by others.

We do not go back. We head for the lights. We make it to the lights. I was the captain. I was the captain.

On the day I left home, bombs fell on a mother nursing her child in a public shelter, bombs fell on a wedding, the bride and the groom. A bomb dismembered a man weeding his cabbage, and the horse nearby eating an apple. On a young woman talking on her phone.

16 Bombs interrupt a song a confession, a brushstroke a prayer, on the day I left one kills a boy, who’d picked up stone and was deciding at what to throw it.

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Justen Ahren is an artist and poet living on Martha's Vineyard. His current project, After the War for the Valley uses multimedia to create experiential theater performances on the displacement of people. He is author of two collections of poetry, A Strange Catechism and A Machine for Remembering. His work and music can be found at https://www.justenahren.com/

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18 Joanna Wróblewska

Illegal Raven*

An illegal raven breathing in the same air as us he would prefer his own thousands of eyes look at him observe each of his slow movements his heart bumps.

No man’s land doesn’t exist even moon is taken and the sky, and soil some buried bones are theirs we have ours.

Landing is not an option each branch has a label drained, he glides over my head I let him land on my shoulder unknown nationality, the same warmth one glimpse makes me stronger my home will be his home.

* This poem was written after visiting Palestine, where I crossed one of the checkpoints with dozens of Palestinians doing so on an everyday basis. That day, I also learned that many of them have a “nationality unknown” status in their passports.

illustration credit: "Illegal Raven" by Joanna Wroblewska, 2018

Joanna Wróblewska is a visual artist and art educator with a Ph.D. in Visual Arts. For more than 10 years, she worked with international students of various ages. Currently, she studies Expressive Arts Therapy in Germany and Switzerland. She is especially interested in working with refugees

19 and migrants who came to Berlin, Germany in last couple of years. Website: joannawroblewska.com; Email: [email protected]

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Elizabeth McKim

Refugees

We are stolen From ourselves and lent to others Whom we do not know

We move with alacrity across The borders defining us, that contested space between Your country and mine, refugees congested among Migrants, and refugees pushing their belongings behind Multiple war-zones and finally diving under Ground, defying the gravity pull of the situation not over…..

Did you dare think it was over On your side or mine, between Your country or mine, under The explosives and the blaze, among Refugees and migrants, sprinting from behind The barricades in flame, and finally free-falling across

The free fall zone like bloody leaves free falling across Porous borders. “No fence can keep us out now,” we chant as we over- Come walls we refuse to hide behind, Never mind the heated breath of the pack expanding the space between You and me, undermining your country and mine as we crawl among Human beings overwhelmed and suffering, not under-

Standing the imperative of our own authority; still, we move under- Ground and begin to tunnel over- Land, overwhelmed and suffering, we move as a family among Your tribe and mine, as we recover the drowned and the dragged behind As we keep our vision focused between The bodies and the bridge we cross, among

Refugees from Your country and mine, among Familiar borders of memory and time, over- Taking the treacherous path between Your country and mine, moving deftly between Outstretched arms and waiting buses with closed doors under

20 Tear gas and razor wire, we are left behind

And stranded in strange places we fear; behind Makeshift barricades constructed across Strangled neighborhoods and bombed out buildings, and over On the opposite side of the city among Dark figures in a cluster of smoke, we dance between Chaos and the new moon standing under-

Hope and desolation crossing relentlessly under Searchlights carving the space between us, leaving behind Shredded flyers flapping among roadmaps… we look over

Elizabeth McKim is an engaging poet-performer and teacher, well-known to Boston audiences and students of all ages. She works out of the oral tradition of song, story, and poem. She has published four books of poetry and has worked with countless children and teachers throughout the USA and internationally. She is Poet Laureate at the European Graduate School EGS and an adjunct Faculty member at Lesley University in the Department of Creative Arts in Learning.

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Meg Braley

No Kindness Here

Undocumented, separated from my man, fear spreads like spilled ink.

Undocumented, chained and caged, disbelief erupts.

Undocumented, child ripped from my arms, desperation shrieks.

Who will help me? Who will know? Who will see?

Panic explodes my chest shock floods my body

21 I howl the despair of the powerless.

Meg Braley is a retired psychiatric nurse and a social/environmental activist who finds her heart’s expression in writing poetry. Although she lives with her husband in the woods of Maine, she says that a day doesn’t go by without her life, and the lives of her friends and neighbors, being haunted by our government's current inhuman attitude towards and treatment of immigrants. She recently travelled to the Arizona border to learn more about the multitude of harmful effects of the border wall.

Photo by Meg Braley &

22 M. Soledad Caballero

After the Election: a father speaks to his son

He says, they will not take us. They want the ones who love another god, the ones whose joy comes with five prayers and songs to the sun in the mornings and at night. He says, they will not want us. They want the ones whose tongues stumble over silent e’s, whose voices creak when a th suddenly appears in the middle of a word. They want the ones who cannot hide copper skin like we can. He says, I am old. I lived through one revolution. We can hide our skin. We have read the books. He says, we are the quiet kind, the ones who stay late and do not speak, the ones who do not bring trumpets or trouble. He says we are safe in silence. We must become ghosts.

I think, so many are already dust, tried to stay thin, be small, tried breaking their own bone and voice, tried to be soft, like a heart in the middle of the night. So many tried to be nothing, to be only breath. Be still enough to be left alone. Become shadows, trying not to be bodies.

It never works. To become nothing. They come for the shadows too.

M. Soledad Caballero is Professor of English at Allegheny College Her scholarly work focuses on British Romanticism, travel writing, post-colonial literatures, WGSS (Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies), and interdisciplinarity. She is a 2017 CantoMundo fellow, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, a New Poet's Prize, has been a finalist for the Missouri Review's Jeffry E. Smith poetry prize, the Mississippi Review's annual editor's prize and a finalist for the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award sponsored by the Poetry Society of America. Her work has appeared in the Missouri Review, the Mississippi Review, the Iron Horse Literary Review, Memorius, the Crab Orchard Review, Anomaly, and other venues.

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Elexia Alleyne

Love for my Culture Maybe it’s the Spanish running through my veins That’s the only way I know how to explain it Maybe it’s the r’s rrrolling off my tongue See, When I speak in Spanish It takes the air from my lungs The love for my culture will never die The love for my culture will forever thrive And while you get up and have your milk and cereal Siempre desayuno con plátano de mangu Not no cheerios I’m always mix it up Con salsa y merengue Constantly getting sideways looks Like, she speaks no ingles Yo si puedo hablar, ingles y espanol Hasta puedo entender dos y tres Languages Confronted with problems like immigration Forced to have my parties in the basement Confined to the more popular story that my family Criss, crossed, and slid past borders Trying to find a new place to live We might be guilty of chasing paper without papers but when that visa is blinking green It’s saying “ Go, go mijita! Fight for your dreams!” See, my granny came here with a belly full of liberty and hope She bore them both Naturalization is just the wiping out of my roots made legal under oath Invisible legally but Constantly contributing economically Corporate America doesn’t want to see me But the fields y los barrios embrace queen My culture has this game on choke hold Americana y Dominicana means I’m worth gold With traditions so deep And a passion this strong The love for my culture Will forever live on

24 Elexia Alleyne, known as "Mama Lexi”, was born and raised in Washington, D.C. She began writing in the sixth grade and has performed on stages ranging from The Kennedy Center, the Atlas, THEARC, to the Built on Stilts festival in Martha's Vineyard. She was one of six poets to participate in Split This Rock's 2015 Fly Language program where she traveled to South Africa to share and perform original poetry with other youth. Lexi is a member of FRESHH, the 2015 DC Youth Slam Team, Words, Beats & Life and wrote and modeled for LOVE Girls Magazine. Currently, Lexi is a Speech Pathology major at Old Dominion University.

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Camille T. Dungy “Frequently Asked Questions: #7” from Trophic Cascade © 2017 by Camille Dungy. Published by Wesleyan University Press and republished with permission

Frequently Asked Questions: #7

Is it difficult to get away from it all once you've had a child? I am swaying in the galley—working to appease this infant who is not fussing but will be fussing if I don't move— when a black steward enters the cramped space at the back of the plane. He stands by the food carts prepping his service. Then he is holding his throat the way we hold our throats when we think we are going to die. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. He is crying. My God. What they did to us. I am swaying lest my brown baby girl make a nuisance of herself, and the steward is crying honest man tears. Seeing you holding your daughter like that—for the first time, I understand what they did to us. All those women sold away from their babies, he whispers. I am at a loss now. Perhaps I could fabricate an image to represent this agony, but the steward has walked into the galley of history. There is nothing figurative about us.

Camille T. Dungy is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), winner of the Colorado Book Award, and the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood and History (W.W. Norton, 2017), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has edited anthologies including Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. Her honors include a 2019 Guggenheim fellowship, NEA fellowships in poetry (2003) and prose (2018), an American Book Award, two Northern California Book Awards, two NAACP Image Award nominations, and two Hurston/Wright Legacy Award nominations. Her poems have been

25 published in Best American Poetry, The 100 Best African American Poems, and over thirty other anthologies. She is a professor at Colorado State University. http://www.splitthisrock.org/poetry-database/poem/frequently-asked-questions-7

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Hieu Minh Nguyen

Politics of an Elegy in conversation with Danez Smith & sam sax

If things happen the way they are supposed to my mother will die before me. My mother, who, by then, will love me will die.

My mother, who, by then will, hopefully, be happy, will walk without pain from this life into the next

& I, her only son, her writer son will stay to translate her life into English.

Any adjective can be true if you cry hard enough.

I can lie & say I haven’t written the poem haven’t buried her over & over at my desk haven’t described the ash of her body.

I throw a fist full of sand in the air & pretend to weep.

I write the poem. I fill my lungs with English. I numb her skin with English. I English the light she walks into.

I kill her just to raise her from the dead.

26 I anticipate this grief by exhausting it with music. I pry open the casket. I make her twirl in the center.

Hieu Minh Nguyen is a queer Vietnamese American poet from Saint Paul, Minnesota. He is the author of This Way to the Sugar (Write Bloody Press, 2014) and Not Here (Coffee House Press, 2018). A recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, Hieu is also a 2018 McKnight Writing Fellow, a Kundiman Fellow, and a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow. His work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Best American Poetry, The New York Times, and elsewhere. He is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

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Scott Ruescher

For Nefertiti Negrón

Wandering the aisles of the spacious artesanía At the foot of El Yunque, I came across an alcove hung With pretty pastels by an “M. Negrón,” island landscapes With pre-Columbian scenes that reminded me, Even more intensely than this or that beautiful woman In San Juan had reminded me, of your mother Marie And the stories she told me in the warmth of the kitchen In the apartment below me, in the dark winter Of 1977, that year she lived alone with you, Her brown-eyed, curly-haired, newborn baby, On the ground floor of the brown triple decker with flaking white trim On dead-end Glade Road, on the edge of Franklin Park, In the Hispanic barrio of Jamaica Plain, in Boston.

There were pictures, predictably, of the tropical paradise That the native Tainos inhabited before The conquistadors’ arrival put an end to it all— The wearing of loincloths, the fishing with spears, the building Of uncomplicated huts with thatched palm roofs And quadrangular boats that were good enough already— Including one of a little girl sitting in the fine sand By a translucent pool that the receding tide had left for her, A spiraling pink conch pressed to her left ear, her index finger Plugging her right. There was a tranquil nighttime interior Of a woman nursing her child by light of a cook fire That cast her shape in flickering shadow on the thatched wall,

27 And a depiction of a young man hunting with bow and arrow In a mangrove swamp. Six or seven pictures framed For the walls of someone’s room at the end of a narrow hall.

And they were stories, mainly, of her immigrant family— Your mother’s, I mean—of moving with your grandparents To Brooklyn in the 50s, the parents and several kids fleeing From the pointless poverty of the Caribbean island paradise In search of a share of the mainland prosperity In the post-war United States, and taking advantage, Like thousands of other families, of the same Inexpensive air travel that got me to Puerto Rico, Within a few short years making New York more populous With puertoriqueños than the island itself, entire blocks Of the Bronx and East Harlem, the Lower East Side And parts of Brooklyn, filling with the smell of mofongos And pastelillos, the windows of bodegas ripe with them And with panas and cocos, and the summer sidewalks Of the barrios hopping with Caribbean rhythms, Plena, merengue, and salsa tunes, and with the explosive sounds Of teenagers straight from a scene in West Side Story.

In none of M. Negrón’s pastels did Spanish soldiers take Women from their huts by force, men to be burnt at the stake For not understanding the virtues of Christianity, Or children to the school to be taught the grim meaning Of a vanity that had never quite occurred to them As a sin to be forgiven for. No one was ashamed of nudity. No one was wearing shin guards, a metal helmet, and chain-mail Or using a steel sword just to hack a coconut down From the lowest limb of a palm. I didn’t see a single friar In a long brown robe and a beard from some El Greco painting Wandering alone, in a meditative trance, in a monastery courtyard With his rosary, his Bible, and the braided cords he used To flagellate himself. And no one, guilty before accused, Was tied to a palm tree and flayed until his brown skin Peeled off in ribbons like the skin of a ripe plantain.

I picture your mother as she is in that photograph Of the two of you in the grass at the Arnold Arboretum On a walk that summer. Her head of black hair is pushed Up and back from her forehead, the windpipe prominent In the cylinder of her taut brown throat, her mouth With its bright red lipstick open in the raucous laugh That I can still hear from here, nearly forty years later, As you crawled toward the camera in the green green grass.

28 That’s the same laugh that shook the walls of her kitchen too After she’d nursed you and was swaying you in her arms, revealing Her big beautiful teeth and the uproar of the rebellious soul Of someone who’d retained the spirit of the New York streets Even up here in understated Boston, never failing To rise to the occasion that someone with a sense of humor Might have presented her with—as I like to think I did Whenever I had the chance to sit with her in that kitchen Talking over steaming ceramic cups of ginger tea About diapers, Eastern religion, your missing father, money, Brown rice, Puerto Rico, and the history of American poetry.

On the way down from the cloud-enshrouded peak Of rainforested El Yunque, passing turn-offs for valley vistas And scenic waterfalls, I told my friend Saúl all about you— How, after finding no evidence of a living Marie Negrón In a search of the Internet, it had occurred to me, given How few Nefertitis there would probably be in the world, To look for you instead; how quickly I’d found you there Among all the pages about the exotic Egyptian queen For whom Marie named you; and how pleased I was To learn how glad you were to hear from a perfect stranger Who’d not only known your mother way back then But, even better, who actually babysat you sometimes In your apartment downstairs, holding you in his arms With the knowledge that you would never know your own father And making all the coo-coo sounds you make to get A baby to smile, rocking you through the gurgling and wiggling In the warmth of the kitchen on dead-end Glade Road In the Hispanic barrio of Jamaica Plain, in Boston, Before your restless mother got sick of the dark winter And loaded you into the car, a beautiful brown bundle In a soft white shirt and diapers, and took you to the other coast, Away from Massachusetts to the state of California And the city of fallen angels that she’s buried in now, That you said you were calling from when I picked up the phone.

Scott Ruescher explored immigration and related cultural issues, especially with regard to Latin America., in several of the poems in his collection, Waiting for the Light to Change (Prolific Press, 2017). Some of those poems appeared first in Chautauqua, The Harvard Educational Review, The Common Ground Review, and Origins Journal. “For Nefertiti Negrón” won the 2014 Erika Mumford Award for poetry about travel and international culture from the New England Poetry Club and then appeared online with another of his poems about multicultural communities in Boston, “First Annual Fourth of July Anti-Imperialist Picnic,” in The Tower Journal.

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Ifrah Mansour

I am a refugee

I am a refugee, a global citizen, aching for 2 continents, 2 countries, 2 histories, 2 nations, yet abandoned by all. I am a refugee and I shelter humanity. I walked, and ran, and screamed, miles on end, to find peace, before I could pronounce my own name. I come with too many invisible treasures, often misunderstood, feared by all, banned by politics, never belonging, and always longing. I am a refugee and I anchor humanity. A childhood, full of humanity’s lowest moments, I carry, tiny soulless traumas. Time will only harden my flesh, And my survival is a testimony to humanity’s depth and compassion. My traumas will teach the greatest lessons on humanity. I am a refugee and I uplift humanity. I am a refugee. I’m globally homeless, yet my language is an international bridge, my culture is a blanket from the elements of bigotry, my religion is a pillow for my compassion, my history is a lullaby for tales not to be repeated, and my humanity is in the hands of a child sitting in a refugee camp still waiting for a chance to find a safe home. I am a refugee and I challenge humanity. I am a refugee, a wandering, colorful, restless, foreign, alien soul

30 that you were taught to fear, banned and bullied, yet I bring you a slice of the world, of my own home, right here in your backyard. I bring you food so intricately spiced and revolutionized your palette. I bring you my vibrant colors, handwoven with ancient delicate wisdom, that has diversified your closed minded color wheels. I bring you my child, my precious only child, to share a history, a future with you. You and I are too stuck together to be this far apart. I am a refugee and I glue humanity. I am a refugee, a stubborn survivor. You see cruelty tried to break me, wars tried to erase me, bigotry tried to silence me, and politics tried to ban me, but still like time, I stand, still like dust I rise, and still like hope I move, and still like love I flourish. I am a refugee and I heal humanity. I am a refugee, a wandering, colorful, restless, foreign, alien soul. Won’t you just let me find my humanity, right here next to you?

Ifrah Mansour is a Somali, refugee, Muslim, multimedia artist and an educator based in Minnesota. Her artwork explores trauma through the eyes of children to uncover the resiliencies of blacks, Muslims, and refugees. She interweaves poetry, puppetry, films, and installations. She's been featured in BBC, Vice, OkayAfrica, Star Tribune, and City Pages. Her critically- acclaimed, “How to Have Fun in a Civil War” premiered at Guthrie Theatre and toured to greater cities in Minnesota. Her first national museum exhibition; “Can I touch it” premiered at Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Her visual poem, “I am a Refugee” is part of PBS’s short Film festival. "My Aqal, banned and blessed" Premiered at Queens Museum in New York. Learn More: www.facebook.com/ifrahmansourart Booking [email protected] [email protected]

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31 Sally Wen Mao Courtesy of Split This Rock’s The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database http://www.splitthisrock.org/poetry-database

Aubade with Gravel and Gold

I’m sick of speaking for women who’ve died Their stories and their disappearances bludgeon me in my sleep

Their language is the skein in my throat that unravels every time a bullhorn blows, every time a road is paved, every time a railroad is constructed, ballast to blast, built to last against the orange flames of an open, unwritten sky

The bad ballad of a silenced, hellbent woman bled its way into my jaws

And I wake up this morning, every morning eating my disquiet

Crack my window open, their breath rushes in Me, this body, the same weight of disappearance, same weight of fortune

Last night a woman from another century entered me, and her male phantoms possessed me, all night I was warm, cold and savage with their touch

Heatless factories shorn of silk, muslin, and selvage, machineries like guns, no salve for the women’s cracked hands, no salvaging their rations, their ambitions for survival

32 There was the child of a famine There was a girl sold for three gilded ounces at the old San Francisco port

They sailed, they sailed, they sailed through me and I turned gold with that touch

Sally Wen Mao is the author of Mad Honey Symposium (Alice James Books, 2014). Her second book, Oculus, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2019. Her work has won a 2017 Pushcart Prize and is published or forthcoming in A Public Space, Poetry, Black Warrior Review, Guernica, The Missouri Review, Tin House, The Best of the Net 2014 and The Best American Poetry 2013, among others. The recipient of fellowships and scholarships from Kundiman, the New York Public Library Cullman Center, and Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Mao holds an MFA from Cornell University. She is the 2017-2018 Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in- Washington at the George Washington University.

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Odette Amaranta Vélez Valcárcel The following poem is in English and Spanish followed by suggested approaches and thoughts of how to enjoy poetry (in both languages).

Home the corner of my lips blurr something melts in me far from home strange feeling of not being am I another, perhaps? lost I breathe the warmth of your skin appearing on the wood I babble another language my language an orphan inhabits the silence the trees whisper you are at home

I go back to childhood fragile calm

I imagine I go on to another port

Casa la comisura de mis labios se desdibuja algo se deshace en mí lejos de casa extraña sensación de no ser

33 ¿soy otra, acaso?

perdida respiro la tibieza de tu piel asomada en la madera balbuceo otra lengua la orfandad de mi idioma habita el silencio los árboles susurran estás en casa

vuelvo a la niñez frágil sosiego

imagino continúo hacia otro puerto

la vasija silbadora / the whistling vessel – sacred instrument

Some questions to ask in approaching a poem Suggestions: read the poem several times: in silence, aloud, individually and collectively, trying different rhythms and intonations. Then respond to some of these questions and share the responses in a group: 1. Which verses of the poem do you like the most? What do you like about them? 2. Is there a verse that surprises you? Which one? What surprises you about it? 3. What does the poem speak to you about? Does it say something to you? 4. Does the poem remind you of a personal experience? What was it? What was it like? 5. What images does the poem offer you? 6. What sensations does it leave behind for you? 7. What other title would you give this poem?

Algunas preguntas para acercarnos al poema Se sugiere leer el poema varias veces: en silencio, en voz alta, de manera individual, de manera colectiva, probando diferentes ritmos y entonaciones. Luego, se podrían responder algunas de estas preguntas y compartir las respuestas en grupo: 1. ¿Qué versos del poema te gustan más? ¿Qué es lo que te gusta de ellos? 2. ¿Hay algún verso que te sorprenda? ¿Cuál? ¿Qué te sorprende de él? 3. ¿De qué te habla el poema? ¿Te dice algo? 4. ¿El poema te recuerda alguna experiencia personal? ¿Cuál? ¿Cómo así?

34 5. ¿Qué imágenes te ofrece el poema? 6. ¿Qué sensaciones te deja? 7. ¿Qué otro título le pondrías al poema?

Some thoughts about poetic sensibility Poetic sensibility is linked to the possibility of being a sensitive channel of the mysterious soul of the world present in each detail of things; it is a way of being permanently and temporarily in the world which is not only the poet’s privilege. The gift of listening to the enigmatic song of things, through their infinite manifestations, belongs to all human beings and has been very present since ancient times, although sadly, the majority of us have been losing this quality and have entered a state of disenchantment. However, the capacity to poetically inhabit, to be a sensitive portal to the enchantment of the world, is a retrievable quality; and, fortunately, expressive arts are a way that can help us with that. Our poetic sensibility can awaken us from a long sleep and open us up to the re-enchantment of the world.

Algunas líneas sobre la sensibilidad poética La sensibilidad poética está vinculada a la posibilidad de ser un canal sensible del alma misteriosa del mundo presente en cada detalle de las cosas, es una forma de ser y estar en el mundo que no es solo privilegio de poetas. El don de escuchar el canto enigmático de las cosas, a través de sus infinitas manifestaciones, nos pertenece a todos los seres humanos y estuvo muy presente desde tiempos antiguos aunque luego, lamentablemente, la mayoría fuimos perdiendo esa cualidad y entramos en un estado de desencanto. Sin embargo, la capacidad de habitar poéticamente, de ser portal sensible del encanto del mundo, es una cualidad recuperable y, afortunadamente, las artes expresivas son una vía que puede ayudarnos a ello. Nuestra sensibilidad poética puede despertar de un largo sueño y abrirse al reencantamiento del mundo.

Odette Amaranta Vélez Valcárcel (Lima, 1968) enjoys exploring the fields of art, health and spirituality. She is the author of three poetry books and co-author of several books on education. She works by accompanying learning, creation and healing processes through the expressive arts. She teaches in the Expressive Arts Training Program of Tae Peru, in the Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas and in the Bach International Education Program. She is a psychologist graduated from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and a consultant in Bach Flowers registered in the Bach Center of England. She obtained a Diploma of Advanced Studies from the Doctorate Program "Education and Democracy" of the Universidad de Barcelona. She is currently completing doctoral studies in Expressive Arts Therapy at the European Graduate School in Switzerland.

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35 Maria Cristina Rojas

On Language: An Interview with Maria Cristina Rojas by Terry Farish This interview with the Chilean born teacher and writer, María Cristina, is a reprint courtesy of the journal “Tell Me More:” Encouraging and Developing the Voices of English Learners (2018) journal edited by Terry Farish and Carolyn Hutton for New Hampshire Humanities New Voices Project, and courtesy of author Terry Farish.

Terry: I'm fascinated by the idea that bilingual speakers create something brand new when they add a second language to their native language.

Maria Cristina: In some ways, yes! Actually, we have words that you don't have in English vocabulary to describe things or actions or vice versa, [there are words in English that are not in Spanish.]

T: What are some words in Spanish that aren't in English and vice versa?

M: Here is a video that people are already doing in order to describe the situation. https://youtu.be/D0-rC2id8xI Joanna Rants, "Spanish Words that Don't Exist in English”

T: Thank you! From Joanna Rants' YouTube link, I found out that in Swahili, Spanish and Greek, the term "fingers of the feet" is used whereas in English they are "toes". Do you think in both languages when you write?

M: I think in English when I write. But what happens is we expand our vocabulary with a new language and with this we increase cognition.

T: I know you also teach Spanish in New Hampshire.

M: Yes. Students [who speak a second language] perceive life differently. That is one of my reasons for teaching Spanish to American students. I wanted to learn more about it.

T: In Connections programs you invite students to write poems. How do you do this?

M: My experience with ESL groups is that you have to be very gentle and positive at the same time. Learning any language for adults is very difficult. Writing a poem with ESOL adult students can help to improve confidence. First, pencil and paper. Then, offer something that inspires students' imaginations through basic emotions. Choose a theme obviously for the inspiration. Verses have to come from the heart. All the process is going step by step without pressure. So, you can surprise yourself to have symmetrical verses, that could rhyme between verses, usually having the same number of syllables within them. Thus, it is possible to achieve perfect symmetry that you will love.

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36 Women and Children in Detention Trilogy Nightmares and Dreams: Immigrant Voices from Inside Detention by Lynn Ditchfield (inspired by interviews at the Artesia, New Mexico Detention Center for Women and Children) Trilogia Mulheres e Crianças em Detenção Sonhos e Pesadelos: Vozes dos Imigrantes de Dentro da Detenção

Trilogía de Mujeres y Niños En Detención Sueños y Pesadillas: Las Voces de los Inmigrantes dentro de la Detención

To download the full piece for free, translated in English, Portuguese, and Spanish, see: Nightmares and Dreams: Immigrant Voices from Inside Detention (2017) three narratives, two plays inspired from interviews with detainees at the Detention Center for Women and Children in Artesia, NM by Lynn Ditchfield, free curriculum resource on Focus on Immigration Education and Stories Through the Arts (FIESTA) https://fiesta-immigrationfocus.com/.

Introduction: Women and Children in Detention Trilogy Hundreds of women, children and unaccompanied minors seeking asylum from violence in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala are being detained in the US. In the fall of 2014, I volunteered as an interpreter with pro-bono immigration lawyer Rebecca McCarthy, Esq. in the over-crowded, cement Detention Center for Women and Children in Artesia, New Mexico. The life stories, nightmares and dreams of the detainees are compelling. I was moved to write these three short narratives depicting the struggles of the women and children we represented in our brief time there, and later the plays and video.

Most people are not aware that the deep economic and political involvement of the US in Central America relates directly to the poverty and violence that forces Guatemalans, El Salvadorans, and Hondurans to escape their homelands. Each part of the Trilogy represents the combined stories of dozens of women from these three countries. What is not included, because of the complexity of the issue and the short length of the narratives and scripts, is the history and ties of the US in those countries, and the pervasive pernicious belief that for-profit prison corporations should control family detention centers of asylum seekers. However, accompanying Bridges and Borders, there are extensive Resource List for those interested in understanding the situation in more depth (see below FIESTA: Focus on Immigration Education and Stories Through the Arts).

The breakdown of this trilogy is as follows, Part one: Leaving Home is in English, Portuguese, and Spanish. It has been made into a video also available online in English (Guatemala Leaving Home: http://youtu.be/sygxhlKhjvc) and in Spanish (Dejando mi hogar - http://youtu.be/5VN8vz22EW8). Parts II and III are narratives and short plays offered here in English, but available online in Spanish and Portuguese.

These narratives and other resources are available for free to share information and defend the rights of women and children, and unaccompanied minors in detention. (see: Focus on Immigration Education and Stories Through the Arts [FIESTA] https://fiesta- immigrationfocus.com/).

37 Leaving Home –Narrative in English Guatemala

It was not the murder of my grandfather whose stories I was barely old enough to remember. My grandfather’s bravery, going down the mountain to the city, representing the other coffee pickers of our village, like Kayb'il B'alam he stood up for us, but never returned. Only in words and whispers did we chant his praises and feel his presence and eternal wisdom.

It was not the loss of my mother – too sick for healing by the curandera with her charms and prayers. I miss my mother’s caresses and tenderness, but I learned to press the earth and seed the soil, as she would have me do. To cultivate frijol and maize, the beans and corn that sustains us.

It was not even the violation of my body by that man, the one that came with the gang of men, carrying weapons and drugs. They took our boys and taunted our girls, breeding fear like demon breath – the new conquistadores, with tattoos etched in skin, black bandanas, and sunglasses to shield them from the light.

The soul of the mountain is draining before my eyes and I call on my jaguar strength: San Pedro Solóma of Huehuetenango – the place of the ancients – like me the speakers of Q’janjob’al.

I must go now. Leave behind the legends embedded in these lush green mountains of warriors and peaceful gods, of the acrobat corn goddess, she who balances the sun and the moon as the three worlds of the Cosmos collide. Leave behind the stories woven by our ancestors in our dress, colors of our people, intricate designs so ancient they were marked before time began. Leave behind this land, crust of earth – caimán - where my parents and grandparents and their parents and grandparents and those that passed before them worked to harvest its fruits and terrace the fields. Say goodbye to this mighty mountain, the source of childhood laughter, of friendships, family bonds, festivities, and shelter for centuries.

I must flee for my children’s safety before the mountain becomes hollow and turns to dust.

Oh, magnificent Quetzal bird where are you now? With your rainbow-colored feathers, your wings of courage, your swirling, coiling regal tail? Your blood-red chest reminds us of the arrows of sorrow that pierced you. But you did not fall when the sky collapsed, you did not fall when the gods of the underworld beckoned you to fly through caves and tunnels to their planets beneath the mountains. You rose exalted through the window of open skies into the constellations.

And I too move forward away from my broken homeland with my two children on my back, in my arms, on my chest, by my side, crossing the Rio Grande towards the intersection of all possibilities.

THE END

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38 The Lucky One – Narrative in English El Salvador

They call me Afortunada – The Lucky One. I always win games, prizes, races, contests, and score high on tests. My daughter Alma is the same. At three years old, when I would bring her to work at Señora Martinez’s bakery, she would serve the customers as if she owned the place. That bakery closed when Señora Martinez left to go live with her brother. He’s the one who sent her money to buy the store and helped her out with funds from the US to keep the business going. Until the MS 18 gang – the thugs deported from Los Angeles who took over our village - demanded protection money. Then they kept increasing the sum. The police did nothing. Before she closed the store and left El Salvador, Señora Martinez gave me an envelope with money to get away from the violence.

But I wasn’t afraid of the gang. I had no job, no relatives sending me money from the US. And I was so confident in my luck back then. Still they came for me. Four men. Locked me in a room that swallowed me whole. My little one wailing outside the door. Like swamp creatures they stood before me. Strangers with dark glasses blocking their eyes, reflecting my fear back to me from their shiny lenses. One tall with a bulky chest. Another short and round. The third guy flat-faced, empty. The fourth with a twisted smile and babyish cheeks, oily black hair cropped short showing a receding hairline and a blue veined forehead, high cheekbones, a pug nose, and a lunarscape face. I saw their ruthless hunger, their big hands, their dirty fingernails. They raped me, one after the other, leaving me crouched in the corner, covered in their sweat and vile odors. They threatened to take away my child if I didn’t get them money by the next week.

With the contents of Señora Martinez’s envelope, I found a coyote to lead us on the treacherous journey north until we crossed the Río Grande. I begged the US immigration officials for asylum. They held us in a freezing cell for three days with no cot to sleep on, just a cold cement floor. By the time we got here, to join 600 others detained in this prison built for 300, my little one was sick. When her fever would not go down and she was listless in my arms, they loaded her with shots, vaccines, and aspirins. Others were sick too. Her fever frightened me, it went on for days and days until it finally subsided.

Sometimes, I feel I will go mad. Three months ago, soon after we arrived here, contact was made with Señora Martinez’s brother and he agreed to sponsor us. Eventually, we had a trial with a judge who spoke words I could not understand from a television screen. He set the bond so high we must go back to beg to reduce it.

My little one is eating poorly and I have lost my appetite. The food is strange, barely cooked chicken, spongy lifeless bread, no beans, no tortillas, no rice. If we don’t get out this time, my daughter will turn four in a prison.

Our luck will return. I know this deep in my soul. We will wait here for the new lawyer to come get us. I will hum this lullaby to my daughter and wait. I will plan a birthday party where Señora Martinez will bake a glorious cake. And wait. #

39 “Maria Cristina Calderón, 24 years, El Salvador, #232448; Daughter Alma, almost 3 years 11 months, #232449”

She reviews the files of Credible Fear hearings of yet another name, another number. She prepares to represent Ms. Calderón at an appeal to lower the $30,000 bond, set too high for her US sponsor. She wonders if any appeal to lower bond has ever succeeded. Unlikely. It all seems doubtful to her after ten days of keeping up with too many cases, little or no sleep, too many cups of coffee, too much pizza on the run, too many self-doubts of being a good enough immigration lawyer to handle these cases, too many tears shed during late night calls to her husband when she unleashes all the weight of the stories she has taken too close to her heart.

She glances up from the files to see her next client, this young woman cuddling and humming to her child, waiting to be called, waiting for another hearing, sitting tall and proud despite the months of detention, the disquieting months of anxiety.

She knows the history well, and cannot keep her mind from drifting to it. She lived with exiled friends from El Salvador. She was in the streets in solidarity, supported the Sanctuary Movement when refugees poured into US cities in the 70’s and 80’s, one-third of the El Salvadoran population fleeing the brutal civil war. Now, here in a small New Mexico detention center, why would she give up hope? Has her spirit been crushed by the horror of what feels like inevitable defeat?

It is then, in a sudden contradictory flash, that she feels the old energy reemerging, connecting with the why. She sees in this beautiful young El Salvadoran woman an extraordinary resilience perhaps born of battles waged centuries before, from the indigenous Pipiles and Nonoualquenos fighting the Conquistadores, to modern invading armies.

She holds the weighty legal file of her client, yet another young person terrorized by the MS 18 gang. Scratching the surface, finding civil war remnants, it is clear now. The chain of violence will be broken. She takes a breath, calls her client gently. “Are you ready for the hearing, Ms. Calderón?”

“Yes,” comes the response. “Please call me Afortunada, The Lucky One.”

THE END

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40 The Lucky One – Play in English El Salvador

Cast List Afortunada (María Cristina Calderón) – 24-year-old woman from El Salvador Alma – (optional - could be represented by a large doll wrapped in a blanket) Afortunada’s 4- year-old daughter who remains silent throughout the play, sitting in Afortunada’s lap or in her arms. This character could be a male child, adapting the script. Actor(s)/Dancer(s)/Narrator(s)/Chorus – with neutral mask interpreting words (including Archbishop Oscar Romero’s voice) with dance movements. Ideally played by four actors, in script as Ch# 1- Ch# 4 but could be one only actor or several doing dance movements and narration. Lawyer – a pro-bono lawyer volunteering at the Detention Center for Women and Children in Artesia, New Mexico Setting: The setting of this play is the temporary detention center facility in Artesia, New Mexico, which has since closed, moving the women and children to a permanent detention center in Texas. The only set needed is a chair.

The Lucky One –Play in English

{Actor(s)/Dancer(s)/Narrator(s)/Chorus behind Afortunada; Afortunada seated center stage; Lawyer stage right}

Lawyer: {reading files} Maria Cristina Calderón, 24, El Salvador, #232448; Daughter Alma, 4, #232449 I review the files of her Credible Fear hearings to represent her at an appeal to lower the $30,000 bond set too high for her friend in the US who agreed to sponsor her. After three months in detention she is becoming despondent. Her daughter continues to lose weight. But I see extraordinary resilience perhaps born of battles waged centuries before.

Actor(s)/Dancer(s)/Narrator(s)/Chorus: {stage left, frenetic war machine}

Ch #1: From the indigenous people fighting the Conquistadores to modern invading empires.

Ch # 2: The US and Soviets play superpower politics on once sacred ground.

Ch # 4: A brutal Civil War drives 1/3 of the El Salvadoran population to flee.

Ch # 1: Some of their children join street gangs in LA to survive.

Ch # 2: Some later get deported from the US, then return to El Salvador to take over villages.

Ch #4: Their predecessors in the El Salvadoran military acquired warfare, dictatorship, and torture training in Ft. Benning, Georgia. Ch #3: {breaks machine to Audience} I, Archbishop Oscar Romero, speak to you, the soldiers: “In the name of God… I beseech you, I beg you, I command you, stop the repression."

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Chorus: They killed him the next day. {Chorus stiffly remove “Romero” stage left}

Lawyer: {to Afortunada} Are you ready for the hearing, Ms. Calderón?

Afortunada: {to Audience} They call me Afortunada – The Lucky One. I always win games, prizes, races, contests, score high on tests. My daughter is the same. At three years old, when I’d bring her to work at Señora Martinez’s bakery, she’d serve the customers as if she owned the place.

Señora Martinez’s brother sent funds from the US to run the bakery until the MS 18 gang – the thugs deported from Los Angeles who took over our village - demanded protection money. Then they kept increasing the sum. The police did nothing. Before she closed the store and left El Salvador, Señora Martinez gave me an envelope with money to get away from the violence.

But I wasn’t afraid of the gang. I had no job, no relatives sending me money from the US. Still they came for me. {Chorus swaggering, threatening moves facing Afortunada} Four men. Locked me in a room. My little one wailing outside. They raped me. They threatened to take away my child if I didn’t get them money.

Afortunada: {stands, Chorus goes behind, backs to Audience} I found a coyote to lead us on the treacherous journey north until we crossed the Río Grande. {kneeling} I begged the US immigration officials for asylum. {slowly rising}

{Chorus to Audience, one at a time, neutral masks}

Ch #1: They held them in a freezing cell.

Ch #2: With no cot for three days.

Ch #3: Then brought them here to Artesia, New Mexico.

Ch #4: To join 600 other women and children in this cement detention center built for only 300.

Lawyer: {to Afortunada} Ms. Calderón?

Afortunada: {standing proud, to Audience} The chain of violence will be broken. {pause, to Lawyer} Please, call me Afortunada, The Lucky One.

THE END

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42 The Final Goodbye –Narrative in English Honduras I write to you from this damp cell in this country of strange smells and food that tastes of chalk, in this country so unwelcoming to our kind, so unkind to our last shreds of hope for safety. Yet I have chosen to seek shelter for our children and for myself, to give birth to our third child on this land, and to create a promising future for them.

I sit in this damp cell, with pen in hand. This pen considered a weapon in this detention center; as if we who escaped dangers beyond these walls, who cling protectively to our little ones would take a pen and scar a guard, like the criminals we ran from.

You do not know me to write, for only three years of schooling did not stick in my brain. But here, my cellmate tells me to write my story. My lawyer, who slipped me this pen, says I must speak out for all the others like me, for all the other women, for everyone. Can you believe it? I have a lawyer. It is my right, I am told. She is good and pure hearted. She treats me like a friend. She does not look down on me for writing with such difficulty. Two days after I showed her the scar on my forehead and the bruises still discolored on my thighs, she called me back to chat. She looked in my eyes so deeply that I am sure she could see inside my soul. She took my hand and told me that I am not alone; that there is a woman, a famous woman lawyer and teacher in Honduras who has dedicated her life to helping women like me; that she has agreed to testify by phone from Honduras at my asylum hearing. Someone famous who has never met me will be there for us! It makes me feel strong, and strength is what I need to survive yet another month of waiting and trials, and testimony, and waiting. Yes, I will take my time to write my story, since time is what I have here.

And I will write you a final goodbye for I am finding the courage to tell you what I could not that night they came for you; that I am sorry. Sorry to leave our homeland of Honduras not knowing if you are dead or alive. Sorry to take the children with no goodbyes. These letters I write flow into words like tears without end.

We were so young – I was 14 and you 17. Yours was the finest display of sawdust carpets for the festival - the giant turquoise bird with wings of purple, green and gold specks like a magic cloak over the luscious orange flower of Copán. Those hands, your hands, soft, large, strong embraced me to the sway of the music and joyousness in the streets. That night you and I created our festival baby. She’s now older than I was then, and our child made you my destiny. But now, sixteen years later, I have no destiny. Only cement walls and barbed wire and this pen.

They were looking for you that night they almost beat your father to death. Same first name – Rogelio. They came for you; he took the blows. Five men and one boy yelling your name, kicking and punching your dad. An initiation to join their gang, the rival gang, showing manliness through murder.

Eleven days we went back and forth to the hospital as they put your father back together, piece by piece. I begged the police to make a report. They would not.

Where were you? With another woman perhaps?

43 Where were you? Drinking guaro, your true wife? The liquid that takes you away, that folds your frightening, flying fists my way.

Where were you?

You lost your job and drowned your dignity in alcohol. You disappeared with your “new friends,” loud and rough; they used you to run to the border for drugs. Then you reappeared with them. Came back to haunt us, to force sex that was no longer love, with a gun to my head, to entertain your so-called “friends” with our children watching, crouching in fear of their father.

You left again, and this time I was pregnant with a third child, and more afraid of you returning than of being left alone. Those men who came looking for you, the same ones who almost beat your father to death, warned they would come back “to finish the job.” Would it be our son, our daughter, or the child in my womb next time? Your father arranged for us to leave Honduras to seek refuge in the US, far away from you, without our goodbyes.

At the border, we were detained. So, it is from these walls that I write you goodbye; from this seat in this damp cell, in this country of strange smells and food that tastes of chalk, in this country so unwelcoming to our kind, so unkind to our last shreds of hope for safety. It is from this country that I say my final goodbye to you, to my homeland; to forgive you from behind walls too high for your rage to enter; and to promise that I will remember you to our children as the creator of their beauty and the magic cloaked turquoise bird of your imagination.

THE END

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The Final Goodbye –Play in English Honduras

Cast List Marina/ Dancer – pregnant woman in her 30’s from Honduras Chorus – Ideally played by at least four actor/dancers, written in script as Chorus or Ch#1- Ch#4. If needed both Marina and Chorus could be played by one bilingual actress or could be many who rotate saying lines, doing dance movements, voices and narration. Cellmate and Lawyer emerge from Chorus. Setting: The setting of this play is the temporary detention center facility in Artesia, New Mexico, which has since closed moving the women and children to a permanent detention center in Texas. The only set needed is a chair.

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The Final Goodbye – Play in English Honduras

Marina: {sitting center stage on chair} Cuando vinieron por ti esa noche…When they came to get you that night, I did not have the courage to say what I must say now…that I’m sorry. Chorus: Lo siento.

Marina: Sorry to leave our homeland of Honduras not knowing if you are dead or alive.

Chorus: ¿Muerto o vivo?

Marina: Sorry to take the children with no goodbyes.

Chorus: Sin despedirnos.

Marina: My cellmate in this detention center, here in this country of strange smells and food that tastes of chalk, tells me…

Cellmate: {comes forward next to Marina then retreats into Chorus after speaking} Marina, habla… no sientas vergüenza.

Marina: She wants me to speak up, to not be ashamed of the truth. And my lawyer says the same thing. Can you believe it? I have a lawyer even in this prison. They say it is my right. She is kind to me; like a friend, we connect.

Chorus: Tenemos una conexión.

Lawyer: Marina, can you write? ¿Sabe escribir?

Marina: No mucho. I am embarrassed that I went to school for only 3 years. But my lawyer friend does not condemn. {Lawyer comes forward to slip her a pen discretely} She carefully slips me this pen, which is considered a weapon in this detention center. They think that we, who escaped dangers beyond these walls, who cling protectively to our little ones, that we would take a pen and scar a guard, like the criminals we ran from.

Lawyer: Your story must be told for other women like you. Esta historia debería ser contada.

Chorus: {murmur together} Por las otras mujeres. Por nosotras.

Lawyer: {retreats into Chorus after speaking} For other women. For us all.

Marina: I will take my time, since time is what I have here. These letters flow into words like tears without end as I write you a final goodbye.

45 Chorus: Palabras que fluyen como lágrimas.

Marina: {she begins her dance} Éramos jóvenes… enamorados. {Marina dances while Chorus interpret the words in movement and sounds}: We were so young – I was 14 and you 17 - making the sawdust carpets for the festival. All the music and joyousness in the streets, yours was the finest display. Those hands, your hands - soft, large, strong - embraced me to the sway of the music.

Chorus: Esas manos tuyas, suaves, fuertes…

Marina: That night you and I created our festival baby - she’s now older than I was then and the child made you my destiny.

Chorus: Mi destino, nuestra hija.

Marina: {back on chair} But now, sixteen years later, I have no destiny. Only cement walls and barbed wire and this pen.

Chorus: Paredes de cemento.

Marina: {sitting while Chorus interpret the words in movement and sounds} They were looking for you that night they almost beat your father to death. Same first name – Rogelio. {Chorus echo the name Rogelio several times} They came for you, but he took the blows. Five men and one boy yelling your name, kicking and punching your dad. An initiation to join their gang, the rival gang, showing manliness through murder.

Chorus: Pateando, golpeando.

Marina: Eleven days we went back and forth to the hospital as they put your father back together, piece by piece. I begged the police to make a report. They would not. Where were you?

Chorus: ¿Dónde estabas, dónde estabas?

Marina: With another woman perhaps?

Chorus: ¿Dónde estabas, dónde estabas?

Marina: Drinking guaro, your true wife? The liquid that takes you away, that folds your frightening flying fists my way.

Chorus: ¿Dónde estabas, ¿dónde estabas?

Marina: ¿Dónde estabas? You lost your job and drowned your dignity in alcohol. You disappeared with your “new friends,” loud and rough; they used you to run to the border for drugs.

46 Chorus: Cuando volvías, cuando volvías.

Marina: Then you reappeared with your new friends, came back to haunt us, to force sex that was no longer love, with a gun to my head, to entertain your so-called “friends” with our children watching, crouching in fear of their father.

Chorus: Me forzaste.

Marina: You left me pregnant with a third child, and more afraid of you returning than of being left alone. Those men who came looking for you, the same ones who almost beat your father to death, warned they would come back “to finish the job.” Would it be our son, our daughter, or the child in my womb next time? Your father arranged for us to leave Honduras to seek refuge in the US, far away from you, without our goodbyes.

Chorus: Huyendo sin despedidas.

Marina: At the border, we were detained. So, it is from these walls that I write you goodbye.

Chorus: Paredes de cemento. {Chorus begin to create a wall structure – as a frozen statue - with their bodies little by little enclosing Marina, backs to Audience with neutral masks facing the Audience.}

Marina: I say goodbye from prison, behind walls too high for your rage to enter.

Chorus: Ni siquiera tu ira podría entrar. {Chorus finish covering Marina as a wall with backs turned neutral masks facing Audience }

Marina: Goodbye, my husband. Goodbye, my homeland. {Each member of the Chorus turns head only to face Audience as they say their sentence of Honduras facts after Marina’s last words, like bullets, staccato, sharp. After each says her statement, Marina, now covered by the “wall,” puts a white sheet over their heads.}

Ch #1: In Honduras a woman is killed every eighteen hours.

Ch #2: Rape is a pervasive problem.

Ch #3: Women are murdered in public places or often found in ditches.

Ch #4: 96% of the crimes go unpunished.

THE END

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