Ink Knows No Borders Read online

  a triangle square book for young readers

  published by seven stories press

  Copyright © 2019 by Patrice Vecchione and Alyssa Raymond

  For permissions information see page 175.

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  Book design by Abigail Miller

  library of congress cataloging-in-publication data

  names: Vecchione, Patrice, editor. | Raymond, Alyssa, editor.

  title: Ink knows no borders : poems of the immigrant and refugee experience / edited by Patrice Vecchione and Alyssa Raymond.

  description: New York : Seven Stories Press, [2019] | Audience: Grades 7-8. | “A Triangle Square Book for young readers.” | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  identifiers: LCCN 2018052736 (print) | LCCN 2018059209 (ebook) | ISBN 9781609809089 (Ebook) | ISBN 9781609809072 | ISBN 9781609809072 (paperback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781609809089 (ebook)

  subjects: LCSH: Immigrants—United States—Juvenile poetry. | Refugees—United States—Juvenile poetry. | American poetry—21st century.

  classification: LCC PS617 (ebook) | LCC PS617.I53 2019 (print) | DDC 811/.60803581—dc 3

  lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018052736

  Printed in the USA.

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  Editors’ Note

  Patrice Vecchione and Alyssa Raymond

  Foreword

  Javier Zamora

  Departure: July 30, 1984

  Joseph O. Legaspi

  Immigrant

  Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

  First Light

  Chen Chen

  Origin / Adoption

  Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello

  Dear America

  Sholeh Wolpé

  Second Attempt Crossing

  Javier Zamora

  Bent to the Earth

  Blas Manuel De Luna

  A Hymn to Childhood

  Li-Young Lee

  Immigrant Aria

  Rajiv Mohabir

  On Being American

  Samira Ahmed

  Oklahoma

  Hala Alyan

  On Listening to Your Teacher Take Attendance

  Aimee Nezhukumatathil

  The Break-In

  Hafizah Geter

  #Sanctuary

  JoAnn Balingit

  Extended Stay America

  Janine Joseph

  Choi Jeong Min

  Franny Choi

  Muslim Girlhood

  Leila Chatti

  Fluency

  Michelle Brittan Rosado

  Master Film

  Solmaz Sharif

  The Key

  Ladan Osman

  Ode to the Heart

  Ellen Bass

  The Sign in My Father’s Hands

  Martín Espada

  History Lesson

  Jeff Coomer

  My Father Takes to the Road

  Jeff Tagami

  My Grandmother Washes Her Feet in the Sink of the Bathroom at Sears

  Mohja Kahf

  Frank’s Nursery and Crafts

  Bao Phi

  In Colorado My Father Scoured and Stacked Dishes

  Eduardo C. Corral

  Learning to Pray

  Kaveh Akbar

  Naturalization

  Jenny Xie

  East Mountain View

  Paul Tran

  Acolyte

  Tarfia Faizullah

  Tater Tot Hot-Dish

  Hieu Minh Nguyen

  Pronounced

  Carlos Andrés Gómez

  Off-Island Chamorros

  Craig Santos Perez

  A New National Anthem

  Ada Limón

  Portrait of Isako in Wartime

  Mia Ayumi Malhotra

  Domesticity

  Kristin Chang

  The Poet at Fifteen

  Erika L. Sánchez

  Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong

  Ocean Vuong

  ode to the first white girl i ever loved

  José Olivarez

  Talks about Race

  Mahtem Shiferraw

  Mama

  Emtithal Mahmoud

  Split

  Cathy Linh Che

  When the Man at the Party Said He Wanted to Own a Filipino

  Marianne Chan

  Ode to Enclaves

  Chrysanthemum Tran

  Ethnic Studies

  Terisa Siagatonu

  The Day I Realized We Were Black

  Yesenia Montilla

  quaking conversation

  Lenelle Moïse

  Atlantis

  Elizabeth Acevedo

  The Border: A Double Sonnet

  Alberto Ríos

  Las Casas Across Nations

  Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs

  Mexicans Begin Jogging

  Gary Soto

  Field Guide Ending in a Deportation

  Marcelo Hernandez Castillo

  I Used to Be Much Much Darker

  Francisco X. Alarcón

  A Habitable Grief

  Eavan Boland

  Return

  Gala Mukomolova

  Adrift

  Alice Tao

  Author’s Prayer

  Ilya Kaminsky

  Game Of Thrones

  Fatimah Asghar

  Oh, Daughter

  Monica Sok

  Refugees

  Brian Bilston

  Home

  Safiya Sinclair

  Undocumented Joy

  Yosimar Reyes

  self-portrait with no flag

  Safia Elhillo

  Afterword

  Emtithal Mahmoud

  Acknowledgments

  Biographies

  Permissions

  Index

  To be rooted is perhaps the most important

  and least recognized need of the human soul.

  —simone weil

  I wish maps would be without

  borders & that we belonged

  to no one & to everyone

  at once, what a world that

  would be.

  —yesenia montilla

  let me tell you what a poem brings . . .

  it is a way to attain a life without boundaries.

  —juan felipe herrera

  Editors’ Note

  At the time of this writing, with the manuscript of Ink Knows No Borders nearly complete, the United States is in a dismal mess. Children are separated from their families as they attempt to enter the country, young people who were brought to the US as children without documentation are threatened with deportation, and the Supreme Court has allowed the president to carry out his ban on immigrants based on the idea that some human beings are “illegal.”

  In his poem “Off-Island Chamorros,” Craig Santos Perez writes this truth: “Remember: / home is not simply a house, village, or island; home / is an archipelago of belonging.” For people to leave their home and cross a harsh desert or sea, often with small childre
n in tow, they must be fleeing something too difficult for many of us to fully imagine: civil war, political or religious persecution, gang violence, lack of work, hunger, or natural disaster.

  Ink Knows No Borders celebrates the lives of immigrants, refugees, exiles, and their families, who have for generations brought their creative spirits, resilience and resourcefulness, determination and hard work, to make this land a home. They have come from the Philippines, Iran, Mexico, Russia, Vietnam, El Salvador, Sudan, Haiti, Syria, you name it. Enter the place of these poems, bordered only by the porousness of paper, and you’ll find the world’s people striving and thriving on American soil.

  There is the daughter whose mother packed three days’ worth of underwear in a ziplock bag in case ICE showed up at her school, the child wishing to change her name to something more “American,” the dried desert creek where forty people sleep, the beer company that “did not hire Blacks or Puerto Ricans,” an immigrant mother’s vindication when her math, much to the surprise of fellow shoppers, is proven correct at a check-out counter, a son who “ached to be [as] beautiful” as his praying Muslim father, the fifteen-year-old who understands her parents as poorly as they understand her, the young poet who writes, “I don’t know how to think of this— / I wasn’t taught to notice one’s colors,” and more, so much more.

  These poets know that the pen holds a secret, a secret that can only be uncovered by putting that pen to paper, in a crowded coffee shop or some solitary place, maybe in the middle of night or when the dawn won’t let you sleep, inspired, as you are, by birdsong or your own song. They know that “This story is mine to tell.” These lived stories, fire-bright and coal-hot acts of truth telling, are the poet’s birthright—and a human right.

  Whether you were born in this country or another, whether you came here with the help of a “coyote,” crammed in a too-small boat, or with a visa and papers in order, whatever your skin color or first language may be, whomever you love, writing poems is a way to express your most authentic truths, the physical ache of despair, the mountaintop shout of your joy. Writing poetry will help you realize that you are stronger than you thought you were and that within your tenderness is your fortitude.

  Not only does ink know no borders; neither does the heart.

  patrice vecchione and alyssa raymond

  Foreword

  america, am I not your refugee?

  —fatimah asghar

  ¿When & how can you start to tell the story of where you or your family comes from? ¿The why of being in another country? ¿And should you? Growing up in San Rafael, California, after emigrating from El Salvador unaccompanied at the age of nine, I never asked these questions. Didn’t dare. From the moment I crossed the border through the Sonoran Desert—no, way before that—from the morning I said goodbye to Grandpa from the back of a bus near the Guatemala–Mexico border, I knew never to speak of what would happen.

  I would not see Grandpa for six years, Grandma for nineteen. When I was reunited with my parents, they told me not to tell anyone about being born in another country, about my “illegal entry,” about what I had experienced those two months when no one knew my whereabouts, when even the people in my parents’ ESL class prayed and lit candles so I would make it here safely. It became my secret. In her poem “Return,” Gala Mukomolova writes, “It happens, teachers said, that a child between countries will refuse to speak.” Absolutely. Since our reunion in Arizona, I’ve spoken to my parents about those two months only twice in my life. Both times, after I started writing poetry. Both times, their guilt, their remorse, their asking for forgiveness, made us stop with the questions, and we let out our tears.

  Before I had the tools (the pen and paper of poetry) to replay, analyze, revise the trauma my “refugee story” embodied, I held all of that anger deep inside, believing that what I had been through could be forgotten, but trauma doesn’t work that way. I thought no one—not my parents, not my friends, not the best counselor—could understand what I had experienced. I truly believed I had been the only nine-year-old who had migrated by himself, crossed an ocean, three countries, and a desert. Like Mahtem Shiferraw describes in her poem “Talks about Race,” “I [didn’t] know how to fit, adjust myself within new boundaries— / nomads like me have no place as home, no way of belonging.” I started drinking and hanging out with the wrong people in my apartment complex. Wearing certain “gang” colors. My friends and I were not real gangsters; we were just trying to prove ourselves to one another. I could’ve been an honor-roll student in middle school, but my behavior kept me from it. Once, I threw a bottle of water at my seventh-grade teacher. I was kicked out of class multiple times for saying something vulgar to make everyone laugh. I needed to be seen. Heard. I wanted someone to ask me what was wrong with me and truly mean it. For me to be able to break down and cry in front of them. That never happened.

  Because I was good at soccer, in part because I let my anger out on the soccer field, I got a fancy scholarship to attend a fancy high school. My first real culture shock. Adjusting to the US after migrating was difficult, but at my elementary and middle schools, everyone looked like me. Not at Branson. I was one of six Latinx students in the entire school of 272. I put up a front. Guarded myself with the baggy clothes, slicked-back hair, gold chain that said “El Salvador,” and too much cologne. Even the seniors were scared of me. They’d never seen anyone from my part of Marin County. I continued to act out in class. I wanted to lose my scholarship so I could attend the public high school with my brown friends. Luckily, after the third time I got kicked out of both freshman math and English, I was asked to meet with all my teachers and my soccer coach. They showed me that they really believed in me and gave me an opportunity to succeed. After four years at Branson, I got into UC Berkeley.

  It was in high school that I allowed poetry to discover me. My senior-year English teacher devoted a full three weeks to the subject, bringing in a real-life poet, Rebecca Foust, who reintroduced me to Pablo Neruda. My parents owned a CD of Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair in Spanish, which I hated. But now, seeing Spanish and English on the same page was like magic: the first moment the two sides of my identity existed side by side. And when Neruda talked about the landscape of Chile, his verses reminded me of home. I wrote my first poem “Mi Tierra (My Land),” and began to rediscover what I had tried to forget. Neruda led me to Roque Dalton, Claribel Alegría, Sharon Olds, June Jordan, Yusef Komunyakaa, Charles Simic, and eventually to some poets in this anthology. Poetry showed me that I was not alone. Like Safia Elhillo writes in her poem “self-portrait with no flag,” “i pledge[d] allegiance to my / homies.” My first real homies—the ones who gave me permission to face my trauma of immigrating, of having left “home”—were poets.

  I’d lived a childhood in El Salvador; but like Li-Young Lee says in his poem “A Hymn to Childhood,” I just didn’t know “which childhood” that had been. ¿Was it one that would “never end,” one that I would “never escape”? I knew for certain it was one that “didn’t last.” It ended too soon. I’d traded hide-and-seek with my friends for real-life hiding from the authorities, in boats, under buses, under bushes. What guided me was the hope of seeing my parents again. That I would finally meet the father that had left me when I was about to turn two. The father who had once held me on his shoulders as he ran on the soccer field before his game. On the page, because of poetry, I could write that reality, those images I’d heard about. I could replay Mom’s palms caressing my head before I went to bed.

  Poetry let me tap into these and many other memories. It let me tap into everything I’ve revealed to you now. It has taught me that it’s OK to open up. It’s OK to look inward, to hold those around us accountable for their actions. Taught me that speaking out is the beginning of healing. I thank my parents for listening to my poems even though the poems were not nice to them. I’m not saying I have completely healed. I’m not saying poetry can fix everything, because it hasn’t, but it was the beginning, the const
ant thing, on my road to my own healing. Like Ocean Vuong writes in his poem “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong,” “the end of the road is so far ahead / it is already behind us” and “The most beautiful part of your body / is where it’s headed.” I can see the end now. I can imagine the next step. I know for a fact, I wouldn’t be able to do that had poetry not found me. Had I not believed, even for a second, in its magic.

  I’m writing this at my childhood home in El Salvador, outside with frogs and birds all round. My house is in the flight path from the airport and I remember imagining, as a child, every plane was a plane to the US. Four, five times a day I looked up, seeing the path I hoped to take to be reunited with my parents. It did not occur that way. I did not experience the privilege Lena Khalaf Tuffaha describes in her poem “Immigrant” of leaving my homeland “on the magic carpet of [my] navy blue / US [passport].” I will soon experience that, however. I passed my visa interview and am currently waiting for my passport. It was poetry, not soccer, that got me to college and eventually opened up a path toward an EB-1 visa, a Green Card.

  It’s been difficult to be here, the place I wanted to return to, but hadn’t for nineteen years. Last night I heard gunshots. This morning, the church bells rang, signaling another death. It has been difficult to see how much it has changed, how much I have changed. Like Craig Santos Perez writes in his poem “Off-Island Chamorros,” I “feel foreign in [my] own homeland.” I’ve been here three weeks, living in uncertainty, not knowing if I would get approved. All this time children have been separated from their families at the US border. I’m reading and watching the news in the country many of those families are fleeing. It has been a blessing to have the poets you will find in these pages here with me. I’m lucky I can hold these poems close, to show me how to process what I’m living through.

  javier zamora

  Departure: July 30, 1984

  We were not prepared for it—

  America, the land cut like a massive slab

  of steak. Our mother did not sit us down

  to explain, and nothing was said

  over the black coffee and rice

  soup at mealtimes. My siblings and I approached

  our inevitable leaving with numb