"No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark …" — Warsan Shire No one leaves home unless your next-door neighbor is an MS-13 gangster who’s teaching your ten year old son how to rob gas stations, how to sell drugs, how to torture, cripple, and kill … No one leaves home unless you see on TV the naked, burnt body of a dead baby set aflame with his entire family inside their house, police snipers outside ready to shoot anyone who manages to survive or any fireman who tries to extinguish the fire … No one leaves home, unless the government sends thugs wearing hoods and soldiers with high powered weapons of war against students armed with nothing but rocks, slingshots, and cell phones to record the bullet entering the skull, the spurts of blood impossible to contain, faces and legs blown to pieces, the terrified friends, the wounded animal screams … No one leaves home for fun, like going for a picnic by the shore or to visit grandma on her birthday, no one decides on a whim to grab the one, five, ten year old child for a three month long journey through hell if they weren’t running for their lives, if what’s ahead weren’t less deadly than what’s left behind. No one would willingly risk rape, assault, hunger, the heat of unforgiving desert sands or the official gorillas at the border who blindly follow orders without compassion, ready to take terror-stricken children away from desperate parents, place them in cages, and send them to whoever and for whatever purposes, not bothering to write down a name, a phone number, an address, to find them later and deport them with their parents. At fancy restaurants, you receive a claim check to retrieve your coat after dinner, why is the life of a dark-skinned child less valuable than a raincoat or the two and a half yards of a wool jacket? Are migrant children so unimportant, so undeserving of kindness, that no one thought of keeping track? This is the nation many countries aspired to be (at least until now), a shining hope now tarnished by greed, racism, ignorance, and corruption, no better than the so-called “shithole countries” or banana republics with their wannabe little emperors, who help their cronies and relatives become wealthy with official jobs where millions are made and hidden away in Caribbean islands. Still, this place, this place is something better, a cut above others where decency, sanity, and prayers have proved as useless as a guitar for a man with no arms, healthier than the burning countries left behind, better than the death sentence of an MS-13 friendship, safer than the knife under the ribs, the electric cables to the genitals, the bullet to the forehead or the pliers to the nails … No one would ever want to leave home otherwise, no one …

Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
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