anti-immigration

the black people left, and took with them their furious

hurricanes and their fire-breathing rap songs melting

the polar ice caps. they left behind the mining jobs,

but took that nasty black lung disease and the insurance

regulations that loop around everything concerning

health and care, giant holes of text that all the coverage

falls through. the brown people left, and took with

them the pesticides collecting like a sheen on the skins

of fruit. they went packing, and packed off with them

went all the miserable low-paying gigs, the pre-dawn

commutes, the children with expensive special needs

and the hard-up public schools that tried to meet them.

the brown people left, railroaded into carting off those

tests that keep your average bright young student outside

the leagues of ivy-lined classrooms, and also hauled off

their concentrated campuses, their great expectations, their

invasive technology, and the outrageous pay gap between

a company’s c.e.o. and its not-quite-full-time workers. they

took their fragile endangered pandas and species extinction

and got the hell outta dodge. the black people left and took

hiv/aids, the rest of their plagues, and all that deviant

sexuality with them. they took their beat-down matriarchies

and endless teen pregnancies, too. those monster-sized

extended families, the brown people took those. the brown

people boxed up their turbans and suspicious sheet-like

coverings, their terrifying gun violence, cluster bombs,

and drones, and took the whole bloody mess with them,

they took war and religious brow-beating tucked under

their robes. they took theocracy and their cruel, unusual

punishments right back where they came from. finally,

the white people left, as serenely unburdened as when

they arrived, sailing off from plymouth rock with nothing

in their hands but a recipe for cranberry sauce, a bit

of corn seed, and the dream of a better life. there were

only certain kinds of people here, after the exodus, left

to wander the underdeveloped wilderness in search

of buffalo, tobacco, and potable water, following old

migratory patterns that would have been better left alone.

Source: PoetryNow (2019)