What Rough Beast | Poem for February 12, 2020

Shei Sanchez
Leaving Home

Inside my shallow pocket is a small piece of paper
with all of its corners crinkled like my mother’s face
the day before she died, or like mine the evening

I was forced to leave the only place I called home.
This fragile rectangle of a thing is the vessel that holds
my world entire, its shiny surface the cradle for the earth

where I lived and worked like an American.

You carry no papers      they told me.
Since I was a kid      I said.

My parents carried me here, away from an existence
stitched by carefully drawn breaths and nearly empty
pockets. The choice was made before I learned

how to question why leaving one home
for another was better than dying in the hands
of your own kin, people who breathed

the same air and walked the same path.
A choice was made again, before a rule of law
built by men who fear that I am

a threat to their identity,

before I can ever say that the bench I am sleeping
on at this moment is as foreign to me as the language
my parents spoke in furtive whispers and gilded hopes.

I affix my eyes on my little girl, forever fixed
and three years old, on this single shiny photograph
as I lay my body to rest and soul to perish, no longer able

to fight for my right to be treated as a citizen of the world.

Shei Sanchez‘s poems have appeared in Sheila-Na-Gig and Harness Magazine, as well as in the anthology Essentially Athens Ohio: A Celebration of Spoken Word and Fine Art (independently published, 2019), edited by Kari Gunter-Seymour. She holds a BA from New York University, and an MA in teaching from School for International Training in Vermont. Also a fiction writer, Sanchez is Filipina-American and lives in Stewart, Ohio.

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