This One Got To Me
This poem was delivered yesterday via email. I recommend Poem-A-Day for exposure to a variety of poets, and as a form of therapy to counter the negativity that surrounds us.
Deception Story
by Solmaz Sharif
Friends describe my DISPOSITION
as stoic. Like a dead fish, an ex said. DISTANCE
is a funny drug and used to make me a DISTRESSED PERSON,
one who cried in bedrooms and airports. Once I bawled so hard at the border, even the man with the stamps and holster said Don’t cry. You’ll be home soon. My DISTRIBUTION
over the globe debated and set to quota. A nation can only handle so many of me. DITCHING
class, I break into my friend’s dad’s mansion and swim in the Beverly Hills pool in a borrowed T-shirt. A brief DIVERSION.
My body breaking the chlorinated surface makes it, momentarily, my house, my DIVISION
of driveway gate and alarm codes, my dress-rehearsed DOCTRINE
of pool boys and ping pong and water delivered on the backs of sequined Sparkletts trucks. Over here, DOLLY,
an agent will call out, then pat the hair at your hot black DOME.
After explaining what she will touch, backs of the hands at the breasts and buttocks, the hand goes inside my waistband and my heart goes DORMANT.
A dead fish. The last female assist I decided to hit on. My life in the American Dream is a DOWNGRADE,
a mere DRAFT
of home. Correction: it satisfies as DRAG.
It is, snarling, what I carve of it alone.
Solmaz Sharif’s first poetry collection, LOOK (Graywolf Press, 2016), was a finalist for the National Book Award in poetry. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rona Jaffe Foundation. Sharif is currently a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University in California.
This poem reminded me that fundamentally we are all immigrants in terms of the temporal span of our human life. Life requires that we be on the move, seeking sufficient resources to sustain our physical well being, and the psychological integrity of our individual personhood. I read this poem resonating to the notes of snarling indignity struck by politicos, the uber wealthy all custodians of the status quo—who no longer remember their immigrant status.
