Refugees Displaced in Foil
By Uzomah Ugwu
The guards did not even give us numbers
or sound the vowels in our broken names
that were whole before we arrived
at this destination
that keeps us moving in grief.
She asked what I wanted to eat
like we weren’t going to die here
at any minute, any hour,
borrowed moments we could,
would, not be given back.
She asked with a burnt punctuation
I was forced to feed on for a while ’til
I forged an answer off my dry and unused throat.
Words I cannot remember at all
95 degrees, it did not matter
She grabbed my hand and placed it on my belly,
like she was giving me direction to another life,
and smiled. I wanted to beg her
to take her happiness away
for this was not the place,
here where we laid wrapped in aluminum,
where they baked off our rights as they chose.
We did not give up our freedoms
to feel this consumed.
Her eyes yielded to the floor
for we all were crossing over the border
in hopes of so much more.
Such a high risk for a life
we thought was a myth.
Was it worth it to be sitting here,
like a chicken on a stick
they do not even turn over—do or won’t?
Before I could listen to my grief any longer
she stopped me, looked at me
leaving thorns in my eyes as she said,
“You are always going to be them.”
If you don’t think you have worth in this life,
if you don’t, they will eat you alive.
She took my hand and gave me an orange and smiled,
gazing at the foil that covered us,
smothered refugees
Uzomah Ugwu is a poet-writer and activist.
Photo credit: Mitchell Hainfield via a Creative Commons license.