Ink Knows No Borders Read online

  The one who learns that sometimes the enemy is a smiling neighbor too ashamed to reveal herself except behind the dark curtain of the ballot box. Sometimes your enemy is a friend.

  You are tired of fighting for your name. And tired of the eternal question: Where are you really from?

  You persist.

  Because your name is who you are.

  You weep.

  For a land built on the backs of your black and brown brothers and sisters and soaked in their blood.

  You claim your joy.

  You lay your roots:

  Blood and bone and fire and ash.

  And in this land of the free and home of the brave, you plant yourself.

  Like a flag.

  Samira Ahmed

  Oklahoma

  For a place I hate, I invoke you often. Stockholm’s: I am eight years old and the telephone poles are down, the power plant at the edge of town spitting electricity. Before the pickup trucks, the strip malls, dirt beaten by Cherokee feet. Osiyo, tsilugi. Rope swung from mule to tent to man, tornadoes came, the wind rearranged the face of the land like a chessboard. This was before the gold rush, the greed of engines, before white men pressing against brown women, nailing crosses by the river, before the slow songs of cotton plantations, the hymns toward God, the murdered dangling like earrings. Under a redwood, two men signed away the land and in history class I don’t understand why a boy whispers sand monkey. The Mexican girls let me sit with them as long as I braid their hair, my fingers dipping into that wet black silk. I try to imitate them at home—mírame, mama—but my mother yells at me, says they didn’t come here so I could speak some beggar language. Heaven is a long weekend. Heaven is a tornado siren canceling school. Heaven is pressed in a pleather booth at the Olive Garden, sipping Pepsi between my gapped teeth, listening to my father mispronounce his meal.

  Hala Alyan

  On Listening to Your Teacher Take Attendance

  Breathe deep even if it means you wrinkle

  your nose from the fake-lemon antiseptic

  of the mopped floors and wiped-down

  doorknobs. The freshly soaped necks

  and armpits. Your teacher means well,

  even if he butchers your name like

  he has a bloody sausage casing stuck

  between his teeth, handprints

  on his white, sloppy apron. And when

  everyone turns around to check out

  your face, no need to flush red and warm.

  Just picture all the eyes as if your classroom

  is one big scallop with its dozens of icy blues

  and you will remember that winter your family

  took you to the China Sea and you sank

  your face in it to gaze at baby clams and sea stars

  the size of your outstretched hand. And when

  all those necks start to crane, try not to forget

  someone once lathered their bodies, once patted them

  dry with a fluffy towel after a bath, set out their clothes

  for the first day of school. Think of their pencil cases

  from third grade, full of sharp pencils, a pink pearl eraser.

  Think of their handheld pencil sharpener and its tiny blade.

  Aimee Nezhukumatathil

  The Break-In

  When I close my eyes I see my mother running

  from one house to another, throwing her fist

  at the doors of neighbors, begging anyone

  to call the police.

  There are times when every spectator is hungry,

  times a thief takes nothing, leaves you a fool

  in your inventory.

  How one trespass could make all others

  suddenly visible. My mother counted

  her jewelry and called

  overseas. My father counted women

  afraid one of us would go

  missing. When I close my eyes

  I hear my mother saying, “A’aha, this new country,”

  my cousins exclaiming “Auntie!”

  between the clicking line and their tongues.

  Tonight the distance between me, my mother, and Nigeria

  is like a jaw splashed against a wall.

  I close my eyes and see my father

  sulking like a pile of ashes,

  his hair jet black and kinky,

  his silence entering a thousand rooms.

  Then outside, trimming hedges as if home

  were a land just beyond the meadow,

  the leaves suddenly back.

  When I close my eyes

  I see my mother, mean for the rest of the day,

  rawing my back in the tub

  like she’s still doing dishes.

  Hafizah Geter

  #Sanctuary

  The grownups keep saying to be calm and donate to animals

  but the storms in my heart are too loud, even if they help you

  evolve, Ma says, so for an energy filter I meditate with my iPod

  but as soon as someone insists my cleverness is the cause of my anxiety

  I want to tell them RELAX is not the same as BE STUPID—

  since Friday a dozen people got shot and is it safe

  for illegals? Ma believes in love, gratitude, laughter, cupids and candles.

  Every time I tell her I can’t cope with the stress, she refers to music.

  To me sanctuary is physical, has a body, teeth that can be

  kicked in. Ma says I need to get some spirit, we can talk about it

  in 15 more minutes. When Angel disappeared, it was his car

  registration sticker expired. I can’t believe they call the lockup

  ICE. When I say nobody but Native Americans really comes from here

  the boy at school says the United States became the greatest thing

  that ever happened to the world, even if not everybody

  gets to benefit from the rules. He yells, Before we were immigrants

  at least we were conquerors! My parents argued when Da found out

  how much money Ma gave the elephant fund, while my little sister’s

  busy drawing turkey hands and getting in the way. That kid was born here

  amongst the conquerors and I bet she marries one. Then I’ll remind her

  I am not a flood and nobody opened the gates for me. Now Ma is giving

  a dollar to send “Nosey” to a real sanctuary because somebody hooked him

  to a trailer weighing more than a ton. I too am a draft horse whose hoofs

  need shoes, whose soul is not waterproof, whose energy center leaks,

  whose refuge is not horizontal not black & white, more like dawn

  rolling over me from grey into a hundred shards of roses hand-painted

  in my scared dreams. Sometimes I love how Ma stirs the chili pot

  and watches a kangaroo on YouTube. When I say, Ma we need to talk

  about a Sanctuary City, she says, Hey isn’t that the name of a cosmetics

  center in Arlington? Her motto is “Never microwave anything

  you care about.” I’ll save it for my children; but also, “We Are People

  Not Preventable Crimes” and “I am a Mini-Donation to Everyone I Know!”

  Now that the world is in turmoil, my motto is “Like a raptor

  I fall on my enemies with ferocity, because I am kind.”

  JoAnn Balingit

  Extended Stay America

  My mother ran me across

  the school quad, swearing

  they would come for me

  first. In a bag ziplocked

  right to left across my lap

  she had filled and Pentel-penned

  three days worth of underwear

  and a cordless telephone

  from Pick ’n Save.

  I could smell the manure

  and saddle leather as we drove

  down the 60.

  She told me they wouldn’t

  hesitate to lug me


  by the back of my shirt,

  to drag me over the front

  yard like a bundle

  of firewood. I cracked

  the window, left shoe marks

  on the motel sheets.

  High on Astro Pops

  and candy cigarettes,

  she said, Now

  your classmates will know.

  Janine Joseph

  Choi Jeong Min

  For my parents, Choi Inyeong & Nam Songeun

  in the first grade i asked my mother permission

  to go by frances at school. at seven years old,

  i already knew the exhaustion of hearing my name

  butchered by hammerhead tongues. already knew

  to let my salty gook name drag behind me

  in the sand, safely out of sight. in fourth grade

  i wanted to be a writer & worried

  about how to escape my surname—choi

  is nothing if not korean, if not garlic breath,

  if not seaweed & sesame & food stamps

  during the lean years—could i go by f.j.c.? could i be

  paper thin & raceless? dust jacket & coffee stain,

  boneless rumor smoldering behind the curtain

  & speaking through an ink-stained puppet?

  my father ran through all his possible rechristenings—

  ian, isaac, ivan—and we laughed at each one,

  knowing his accent would always give him away.

  you can hear the pride in my mother’s voice

  when she answers the phone this is grace, & it is

  some kind of strange grace she’s spun herself,

  some lightning made of chain mail. grace is not

  her pseudonym, though everyone in my family is a poet.

  these are the shields for the names we speak in the dark

  to remember our darkness. savage death rites

  we still practice in the new world. myths we whisper

  to each other to keep warm. my korean name

  is the star my mother cooks into the jjigae

  to follow home when i am lost, which is always

  in this gray country, this violent foster home

  whose streets are paved with shame, this factory yard

  riddled with bullies ready to steal your skin

  & sell it back to your mother for profit,

  land where they stuff our throats with soil

  & accuse us of gluttony when we learn to swallow it.

  i confess. i am greedy. i think i deserve to be seen

  for what i am: a boundless, burning wick.

  a minor chord. i confess: if someone has looked

  at my crooked spine and called it elmwood,

  i’ve accepted. if someone has loved me more

  for my gook name, for my saint name,

  for my good vocabulary & bad joints,

  i’ve welcomed them into this house.

  i’ve cooked them each a meal with a star singing

  at the bottom of the bowl, a secret ingredient

  to follow home when we are lost:

  sunflower oil, blood sausage, a name

  given by your dead grandfather who eventually

  forgot everything he’d touched. i promise:

  i’ll never stop stealing back what’s mine.

  i promise: i won’t forget again.

  Franny Choi

  Muslim Girlhood

  I never found myself in any pink aisle. There was no box for me with glossy cellophane like heat and a neat packet of instructions in six languages. Evenings, I watched TV like a religion I moderately believed. I watched to see how the others lived, not

  knowing

  I was the Other, no laugh track in my living room, no tidy and

  punctual

  resolution waiting. I took tests in which Jane and William had so many apples, but never a friend named Khadija. I fasted through birthday parties and Christmas parties and ate leftover tajine at plastic lunch tables, picked at pepperoni from slices like blemishes and tried not to complain. I prayed at the wrong times in the wrong tongue. I hungered for Jell-O and Starbursts and margarine, could read mono- and diglycerides by five and knew what gelatin meant, where it

  came from.

  When I asked for anything good, like Cedar Point or slumber parties, I offered a quick Inshallah, as in Can Jordan sleep over this weekend,

  Inshallah?,

  peeking at my father as if he were a god. Sometimes, I thought my father was a god, I loved him that much. And the news thought this was an impossible thing—a Muslim girl who loved her father. But what did they know of my heart, or my father who drove fifty miles to buy me a doll like a Barbie because it looked like me, short brown hair underneath her hijab,

  unthreatening

  breasts and feet flat enough to carry her as far as she wanted to go? In my games, she traveled and didn’t marry, devoured any book she could curl her small, rigid fingers around. I called her Amira because it was a name like my sister’s, though I think her name was supposed to be Sara, that drawled A so like sorry, which she never, ever was.

  Leila Chatti

  Fluency

  The once-monthly obligation was the phone,

  a plastic conch shoved into her young palm,

  static ocean carrying her English

  over eight time zones to Borneo and reaching

  this aunt or another with a name plucked

  from the Bible, changed by accent,

  laughter not needing translation

  as it surfaced. She imagined this

  as her mother’s revenge for supermarket corrections

  on pronunciation, throat now clotted

  with the tangled seaweed of words

  made meaningless. She can’t blame her

  for the relishing of this silence.

  In the end, the girl would flee, the instrument

  surrendered and an outheld hand

  putting things back where they ought to be.

  Michelle Brittan Rosado

  Master Film

  my mother around that blue porcelain,

  my mother nannying around the boxed grits and just-add-water pantry

  of the third richest family in Alabama,

  my mother at school on Presbyterian dime and me

  on my great grandmother’s lap singing

  her home, my mother mostly gone

  and elsewhere and wondering

  about my dad, my baba, driving a cab

  in Poughkeepsie, lifting lumber in Rochester, thirtysomething

  and pages of albums killed,

  entire rows of classrooms

  disappeared, my baba drowning Bud Light by the Hudson

  and listening to “Fast Car,” my baba on VHS

  interviewed by a friend in New York, his hair

  black as mine is now, I’m four and in Alabama, I see him

  between odd jobs in different states,

  and on the video our friend shows baba a picture

  of me and asks how do you feel when you see Solmaz?

  and baba saying turn the camera off then

  turn off the camera and then

  can you please look away I don’t want you to see my baba cry

  Solmaz Sharif

  The Key

  I was under the kitchen table, guessing who was at the sink by how they used water when I heard my mother say to my father, what about this job, that one, those people, did they call? And my father said, everyone says no. I see all the doors but none of them will open. My mother said, maybe we just haven’t found the right key, I’ll go look for it. They laughed for a long time. Their toes looked at each other. Maybe they forgot the bag of keys in the crooked-mouth dresser. I lined up the keys on a windowsill, metal on metal on my fingers until they smelled like missing teeth. I looked at the best one: large cursive F, a scarlet ribbon tied to it. It had two teeth, like my baby sister. I tried the little door behind the community center. Then the big-kids
door at my school. The shed of a house with a backyard so large the family could never see me. I got grass and sand and an ignorant pebble in my shoe. Dust climbed up my pants so I could spit-spell my name on my leg when resting. I went back to our neighborhood. There was a black cloud over it while the nice neighborhood down the hill shone. A girl said our house was darkest and the first raindrops fell on it because we’re all going to hell. When I told my father he said it was “isolated” or “separated” storms. So it was true we were set apart for a punishment. The next day dozens of dead flying ants covered our patio. I took all the keys and tried all the doors in the abandoned mall. One unlocked. It was a room with white walls, floor, ceiling. White squares of wood flat or leaning in every corner. The door closed behind me and no key would work. Maybe the room would swallow me and I’d get invisible if I didn’t stop screaming but then a surprised guy, white, wearing white, opened the door. I wanted to try one more time but my keys disappeared and everyone said they were never real.

  Ladan Osman

  Ode to the Heart

  heart let me more have pity on

  —Gerard Manley Hopkins

  It’s late in the day and the old school’s deserted

  but the door’s unlocked. The linoleum dips

  and bulges, the halls have shrunk.

  And I shiver for the child

  who entered that brick building,

  his small face looking out

  from the hood of a woolen coat.

  My father told me that when he was a boy

  the Jews lived on one block, Italians another.

  To get home he had to pass

  through the forbidden territory.

  He undid his belt and swung it wildly

  as he ran, wind whistling

  through the buckle. Heart

  be praised: you wake every morning.

  You cast yourself into the streets.

  Ellen Bass

  The Sign in My Father’s Hands

  for Frank Espada

  The beer company

  did not hire Blacks or Puerto Ricans,

  so my father joined the picket line