Aimee Pozorski
Elroy, Arizona
Testimony of Yeni Gonzalez, a migrant from Guatemala, recalled by Annie Correal for the New York Times
She said that they all slept very little,
and they lost track
of what time of day it was.
They said the lights were always on, and sometimes
they’d be startled to learn that it was
1 p.m. when
they thought that it was the
dead of night, and vice versa.
They were living in this kind of perpetual
twilight. Some of the mothers
were fasting, as a sort of
sacrifice or a way to
supplicate so
God might have mercy on them
and reunite them
with their
children.
She said that at the
beginning, there had been
children among them, and
slowly, there were no
children left.
They would give
them soup, this sort of runny
soup, at 7:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m. Sometimes
she wouldn’t eat it at all, and
she couldn’t get the food down, and
she would just take one or two spoonfuls as if it was
medicine. When
she couldn’t eat the soup anymore
she asked an agent or a guard if
she could have a cookie or a cracker.
And he said to her
“No, those are for the
children.”
And she felt that was a small
cruelty, given that there were no
children there anymore.
Author’s Note: This is wholly a found poem—with inserted line breaks and reorganization—taken from the article “My Whole Heart Is There,” by Annie Correal in The New York Times (July 3, 2018).
Aimee Pozorski is Professor of English and Director of English Graduate Studies at Central Connecticut State University, where she teaches contemporary literature and trauma theory. She has written monographs and edited collections on Philip Roth, 9/11 Literature, and HIV/AIDS representation. Her poems have appeared in Paper Nautilus, the Helix, and other journals. She lives in New Britain, CT.
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