680 undocumented workers jailed by ICE in Mississippi
680 people don’t go home when their shift ends
680 people separated from family — partners, parents, children
workers at poultry factories, some of them chicken sexers?
how can this make anyone happy?
600 ICE workers uproot 680 poultry workers for lack of a piece of paper
680 more people in immigration-related custody
land of the free if you’re white & male & wear a uniform & carry a gun
home of the masculine ego, we kill Indians, we reject others
makes me grateful that three ancestor uncles were shot & scalped
although two out of the three had already fathered a family
I’m sure Indians shot & scalped women too
they also took them home & made them Indians
better or worse? is this one better?
or is this one? about the same?
Only in isolation do we succeed in glimpsing the part of ourselves
which is intransferrible, and maybe, paradoxically, that is the only part
worth communicating to others. . . .
Lautreamont’s well-known aphorism: poetry should be made by all. The vast body of folklore seems to confirm the triumph of such multiple anonymous contributions. In this process, words become polished by rolling back and forth between people, like stones in a river, and the ones which endure turn out in the end to be the ones most valued by the collective soul. All that is true, with the proviso that we don’t forget that at every instant there existed a real person, that they were never mere teams, however numerous we believe these makers to be. Yes, poetry should be made by all, but fatally written by one alone.
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