The People Are Dying Here
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.
Little boys run through the streets, crumpled bills in their pockets, selling fruit under the sky, weaving through traffic in the hot sun.
Little girls push their legs closed, and keep their mouths shut, sneak their eyes open during prayer, fingertips burnt from flipping tortillas.
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 only saw her mother on the weekend before the sickness took over.
Angela, at 15, worked long days to bring medicine to her mother’s bedside.
Angela, alone in her room in a house full of men after the funeral.
The mothers are dying there, the mothers are crying there.
Angela danced the pain away, fell in love, and birthed a baby in the mountains.
Angela crossed the deserts, and the forests, and the river with her baby and the man she loved.
From there to here.
Angela comes home at night, with the makeup residue on her eyelids, the alcohol in her blood, the stitches in her heart undone.
Her baby- Where is her baby?
She grew up and left her here, crying here.
The man she loved, gone.
Angela, alone, again and again and again.
The mothers are crying here, The mothers are dying here.
Angela tells her babies her story.
She whispers prayers into sleeping ears, sings to them the songs of her land.
Babies carrying fears with no memory.
Longing for a place they’ve never seen.
Pains from a place they’ve never known.
The babies are crying here, the babies are dying here.
I know those songs. I am the witness, the keeper of memory.
I keep watch hold a light up in the darkness.
To the babies who 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.