Land of the Cranes: List 2

They don’t respond
when Mami pleads
like Fernanda told her
for “political asylum”

They speak only to tell us,
You have been detained for
breaking United States immigration laws.

You will be processed and
taken to a detention facility.

You will be processed and
taken to a detention facility.

Detention, like for being
bad at school?

a shiny concrete rock that glimmers in the sun

She fusses with her baby
a round-faced brown crane chick
who scuttles and coughs into her side.

Carlos, the boy, sways side to side
like he’s almost dancing
with a scowl at me
folded into
the raisin of
his thumb-sucking
face.

She droops sad
like wilted flowers.

Josefina takes a shallow breath
and wants to smile at us
but it is chased away
by her own gloomy voice
as she unravels more
of her story like yarn.

They took my niños from me
days after we arrived here the first time.
They called it “zero tolerance.”

Though I’m starving
I grimace at them

A gun holster like a rattle
shaking with each step.

I can’t get past
those beady eyes
and the hiss that hides
in every order
he gives.

Real rays, sun and sky
speckled by clouds
are a relief from
the freezing cold.

I overhear guards call them
“practically unaccompanied minors.”

He said Aztlán is
our ancestral homeland
and all migrants have come
back home.

He said Aztlán is
our ancestral homeland
and all migrants have come
back home.

But then they give us
a dingy towel and
a bag of old clothes
for us to fish for anything clean.

Yellow Hair comes
in with her baton out

Mami thinks that Yellow Hair
descends from cranes, like us

So they built their city around the tiny sacred island
and filled in the shallow water with earth.

Hey! I'm just welcoming her
to the piojo club. It's her initiation!

she’s as broken
as glass
her heart
so shattered
and
splintered
I can’t
pick up
the pieces.

And this way
around Mami
we are all lulled
and pulled
into her song
and we sleep.

My voice grows raspy
so Mami tells me
to turn my volume down or hum.

She wants you to draw your picture poems again
because she'll need them as testimony.

I would write:
Super Fernanda comes
to try
to pry
us all out.

soon
her little contagious chuckles
make everyone release
a smile and then
little laughs and
out-loud laughter
of their own
that spreads like a
wildfire

When they cut the plastic ties loose
she lunges at one of the guards.