skiing is a dream
found in powdery wide slopes
in Colorado
in 2019
Bruce learned to ski from up high
into a new life
in 2019
a drain drained our resources
and worsened our debt
in 2019
my girls adjusted again
to life’s challenges
in 2019
we were given the rare chance
to make a difference
in 2019
we traveled through the country
searching for ourselves
in 2020
we’ll make a better life
everywhere we go
“Hiking? In the forest? No. Only to look for firewood to cook our food. Not for fun.”
“Yes, I’ve ‘visited’ Mexico. I was there for two months waiting for the coyote.”
“In a room the size of this kitchen there were forty of us. They gave us blankets just like that [pointing to tinfoil]. And when they had to wake someone up to deport them, they woke all of us. And they came in every fifteen minutes to wake someone.”
“Hermano, mira. Hay una lavandería aquí en la casa.”
“My 23-year-old brother wanted to come, but he can’t run fast enough.”
“He can’t run fast enough?”
“To get on the train. I saw so many… broken legs, arms. Even a body with its legs completely amputated. You have to be able to run.”
“I crossed the Rio Grande on a raft.”
“I’ve never seen a dishwasher. We had to wash our clothes and dishes by hand.”
“Eggs, beans, and rice for lunch and dinner. Coffee for breakfast.”
“My cousin bought me the plane ticket, the phone, everything. And the detention center had all of his information, so when I arrived at the airport, the police were waiting for him.”
“$250 here for strep antibiotics? In my country it’s free. Being sick here is a luxury I guess.”
I guess it is.
our preparations
for this moment of our lives
go beyond torrejas
beyond this sweet sauce,
this Christmas stocking for you,
beyond this moment
our preparations
go beyond twenty-two years
when we were babies
when we were in love
as only the young can be
and he promised me
what promise, you ask?
to open our home with love
when it is needed
I tried to be an immigrant once. I failed miserably because I’m too damn American. A privileged white woman. And because it was so fucking easy just to come home after a year.
In the attempt, I cried for months. I wrote constantly about the struggle of it all. The relinquishment of our family home. The endless paperwork. The cancellation of a dream job for something that was meant to barely sustain a recent graduate, not a family of five. Saying goodbye to the colleagues and collegiality I had shared for seven years. Saying goodbye to my family, my friends.
But it was just a farce, really. I didn’t fully fulfill my lifelong dream of Spanish fluency because I spent the majority of my days teaching English and the remainder speaking to my English-speaking family. And the money? The dream? The travels across Europe?
Nothing, I learned in those magical ten months, compares to human relationships. The relationships we’d just begun to develop with my clients, my colleagues, my friends in Spain before we had to board a plane and return to our “life.”
I tried to be an immigrant once, to step into the shoes of someone who has to drive across the country for a visa. To find an apartment. A phone plan. A rental car. A school for their children. In their second language.
I failed.
I bought five plane tickets and flew us back to America before we could blink.
Wouldn’t that be nice? To determine, after a time, that it’s just not right? That you could more or less return to your life and be the better for it? That you could pick up right where you left off, master’s degree in hand, Skype-interview-secured position waiting, to the life that you thought you wanted to leave behind?
Well, my students don’t have that choice. They have witnessed everything you can imagine and everything you couldn’t begin to imagine. They have come here with a singular thought: I cannot, I will not, return. I have stepped on that plane, that train, that three thousand miles of pain, to make this dream a reality.
They come here to relinquish everything about what has shaped them as human beings. Their language, lisping and loving. Their food, aromatic and elegant. Their weather, pungent and tropical, arid and hot. Their religion, every day and every way. Their families. Their communities. Broken or torn, perfect or imperfect, but never enough.
And they know that they cannot look back. That, no matter the circumstance (murdered parents, no literacy, shadows of abuse, a $10,000 bail set on a cousin who came to rescue them from a detention center only to be placed in one himself), they are here. To stay.
They are the brown faces you see on every block building your garages. Hammering your roofs. Serving your dinner. Teaching your children Spanish. Driving your Uber. Replacing your sewer line. Packing your meat. Running your school district.
Their children are your children. Impatient. Anxious. Determined.
They have come here, across the border, across the sea, across their history, to be reborn. They are no longer Hondureños, Salvadorans, Congolese, Burmese, Asian, Mexican, Iraqis.
They are intertwined into the fabric of our country, building the bridges, picking the food, bringing us hope.
And they’re not in the market to give up. To buy a plane ticket home.
To be me.
How humbling that is, to think of staying, of giving up everything for a different life. Of never being able to return.
Of never wanting to return.
Can you imagine?
And this is why my daughter has made this card. 
Why I have spent my evening in Walmart searching for gifts that will never replace a loving family. And why I am so heartbroken and so grateful that my students will never be me.
Have you ever tried to be an immigrant? It is impossible to imagine. To describe. To understand.
All we can really do, as her smile suggests, is build a bigger table. Open our hearts. And welcome those who may never have the privilege to look back.
so simple, really:
the teens play cabin boardgames
while we ski for love
my weekend frenzy
with a pink sunrise startup
ending with a tree
in warm October
you will find his love for me
as in all seasons
I was eight when the plastic surgeons took their scalpels and shaved a thin layer of rectangular skin from my upper right thigh to carefully morph it onto my shoulder and, twenty stitches and forty-seven staples later, make me a new scar over my burn scar.
For the remaining years of my youth, every time I wore a swimsuit, a tank top, an open-necked dress, I had to answer questions. “What happened?” “How old were you?” “What were you doing?” “How much did it hurt?”
Even though I know my mother worried that the questions would always lead to blaming her, no one ever asked me, “Where were your parents?”
Obviously, they had done the best that they could. After a few moments of shock when the six cups of water came tumbling down onto my ballerina-shoe sweatshirt, they ripped off the thick cotton and lifted me towards the sink, flushing me with cold water. They called the neighbor who was an EMT. They placed me in an ice-cold bath to try to soothe the bubbling blisters. They drove me to the hospital, to doctor appointment after doctor appointment for six months. They scheduled the surgery. My mother took off work for two weeks to care for me in and out of the hospital–her only vacation time of the year spent fretting over the major surgery her eight-year-old child had to undergo. The extra three days in the hospital because I just wouldn’t heal. The forty-five minutes I screamed after the surgery because the hospital was undergoing a major renovation and no one could find me a nurse to administer pain meds.
But no matter the sacrifice, no matter the recovery, no matter the gymnastics lessons I took that fall to stretch the skin, no matter the special silicone-filled vest I had to wear for months to press the new skin onto the old, that scar would always be there.
Primarily on my shoulder, but truly spilling beyond their surgical tools till all the way below my belly button, I was scarred for life.
Its bitter reminder stung me on my wedding day when I knew I could only pick a dress that would fully cover my shoulder.
On each of my children’s birthdays, when their anxious, hungry lips opened up a new wound in my left nipple that wouldn’t heal for six weeks of excruciating, needle-through-the-veins pain each time they nursed.
On every cock-eyed look I’d received throughout my life when people noticed the scar more than they noticed me.
I was eight years old when I had the best birthday of my life. My parents spoiled me that year because the surgery would prevent me from swimming in any of the five Finger Lakes for an entire summer, a punishment equal to hell for an upstate-New York kid. They let me have not one (the usual), but three friends spend the night. I got a Smurf watch and two Slinkys and a bouncy Gummi Bears toy that we played with for hours. My mom made a strawberry cake with strawberry frosting because I was obsessed with pink. They borrowed the neighbor’s VCR and let us stay up late watching movies. They made my night magical.
Despite everything–the ugliness of the scar, the ugliness of the pain–the scar became a part of me. So what if every time I went to the beach I’d get a look or too? At least I had a story to tell. At least it wasn’t worse. At least it was the worst thing that had happened to me as a child.
When my fiancé proposed to me more than ten years later, there was only one date I had in mind for my wedding day: 8.8.98. The number reflected everything–twenty years old, infinity, the life-changing events of my eighth year of life.
And though my mother always fretted over my scar, and though I feared making the choice I made yesterday for my entire adult life because of my fear of never healing and that cursed scar, I have no regrets.
It is dark. It is light. It felt like a cat scratching me a thousand times. But it did not feel like pouring six cups of boiling water onto myself. It did not feel like giving natural birth to three 9-pound babies. It did not feel like surgeons pulling forty-seven staples out of my skin graft.
It felt like infinity. Like the perfect figure 8.
Scarred for life. Just like I always have been and always will be.
i never listen
when someone says it’s boring
i always find fun
North Dakota wins
kindness, camping, paddling
and late-night sunsets
Earth lodge history
and indigenous genius
round out this cycle
with Art Deco touch
to capitalize the north
and give us this view
all in a day’s work:
this “boring” state makes dreams bright
campfires and all
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