An illegal immigrant
looks like a nickel tails up on the sidewalk, fallen out of someone’s pocket. She looks like pressed bleached sheets on cheap beds tucked tight, a hundred of them twelve stories high. I saw one like a mango, peeled and sprinkled with chili powder on a stick like america, layers cut diagonally, a flower on Lake Street. She looks like an amethyst grape plucked by the millions, stains like bruises but she’s sorry and she loves you. He looks like that kid I don’t know his name but he sits over there and his lunch stinks. She looks like a street of Harajuku, straight cut bang and bangles, heavy print and bright colors -oh my bad - that’s Gwen Stefani! (She might be legal.) An illegal immigrant looks like Chinese Exclusion 1882 Asian Exclusion 1924 Executive Order 9066 Patriot Act 2001 SB1070 five days ago 1911 looks like an angel made of bunk beds and cells where Chinese men write poems into the wooden wall like it could weather the wait, looks like a store sign in 1922 “Absolutely no dogs or Filipinos allowed”, like 1942 spam rolled up like an enemy internment camp sushi. He is a community tree in the 1930s. Or the 1940s or the 1960s who has seen too many dead people to climb on. |
He is a boat
in 1492 sailing the ocean blue black brown red yellow. He looks like a hill made of bodies covered in grass and a playground, like a scar on the bottom of my feet, still growing. He looks like Joseph Ileto who looked like Vincent Chin who looked like Fong Lee who looked like your neighborhood postman, like a good husband, like a boy on a maddening threatening five deviled bicycle, looked like a good target, like a bad seed, like the wrong crowd, like a jap mother f**ker who stole “our” jobs, so one by one by a hundred they killed them innocently. Because if you look like the law you look legal. And the rest of us are just wire cages and a magic trick away from knowing whose turn it is to be the sacrificial pigeon and it’s showtime, all the time, so you need to know the difference. Christy Namee Eriksen is a Korean poet who has a B.A. in Social Justice, concentrating in Resistance and Racial Justice. She's a featured artist on the 2009 Minnesota Spoken Word Album of the Year, “¿Nation of Immigrants?” produced by The Loft Literary Center. She lives in Juneau with her husband and children. I chose to include this poem in my website because it is a powerful piece that sheds light on the different kinds of illegal immigrants that there are in America, and the discrimination that they face. Poetically, it has a number of similes that are effective in proving what the identity of an illegal immigrant truly is. This poem has a lot of emotional appeal because of the vivid imagery it generates and the sentiment of the author, as proven by the cuss word, this all helps to evoke inner feelings within someone that makes them empathize for these illegal immigrants. Which is what I'm trying to achieve with my project.
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