The People Are Dying Here
Growing up, my parents often told me about why they left Honduras. They spoke about freedom, opportunity, and a better future. As I grew older, I started to question whether migration really ends suffering or simply changes its shape. This poem is about my mother, but it is also about what the children of immigrants inherit long after the border has been crossed.
The people are dying there, the people are crying there.
Little boys run through the streets, crumpled bills in their pockets, selling fruit under the sky, minds worn from the hot sun.
Little girls push their legs closed, and keep their mouths shut, sneak their eyes open during prayer, fingertips burnt after flipping a tortilla.
They watch someone’s dreams play out on a neighbor’s TV. They’re hungry for more.
The children are dying there, the children are crying there.
Angela, the woman I love.
Angela, who only saw her mother on weekends before the sickness took over.
Angela, working long days, bringing medicine to her mother’s bedside.
Angela, in a house full of men after the funeral.
The mothers are dying here, the mothers are crying here.
Angela, who crossed the deserts, and the forests, and the river, with her baby and the man she loved.
She comes home at night with the makeup residue on her eyelids, the alcohol in her blood, the stitches in her heart, undone.
Her baby, she hardly sees anymore. Her baby grew up, and left her here, crying here.
The man she loved, gone.
Angela, alone, again, and again, and again.
Her babies are dying here, her babies are crying here.
I’m here and I remember, I keep watch, I hold a light up in the darkness.
To the babies that died here, rest with me here follow me here, sing to me here. I’ll sing to you like our mamas did, until it won’t hurt as much to cry here.
to die here.