Anchor Baby

By Eros Purizaga

they say just because you can, it doesn’t mean you should.
but mom, now, how were you to know, if you ever even could?
it seems necessity’s a dish best served cold when the world doesn’t really care.
crossing the border where the old & new met & to this day don’t agree much on what is & isn’t fair.

when we forget that borders are sometimes, & maybe even most times,
what we tend to make of them.
like an assumed cadence by a reader lost in stanza’s, never fully understanding
what they truly might’ve meant.

although pregnant, not a doubt ran through your mind.
you never looked back from the american dream you’d gift your sons with you were hoping to find.

assured with the faith that we’re all invited to drink of God’s wine,
which they’ve somehow confused with “God’s whine”,
& took control of His image; our freedom.

so now we’ve become the blind leading the less blind, while trying to simultaneously outshine everyone in a reversed garden of eden.

reversed because now immigrants are accused for something of which has no real resolution.
caught in constant tension between being fed foolish lies or needing a real revolution.

mother your pain; your biggest blessing. that’s what’s odd to me.
& my shame is sometimes acting like i don’t appreciate this american dream.

even in my poetry everything is purple.
i’m the outsider trying to find a peace within; like a square around a circle.

so maybe they’ll never know what it feels like to be too filled with adrenaline to even cry.
& to be told to not look up at night, because your eyes will shine.

but here i am an anchor baby
​with a family of faith praying for my self-proclaimed enemy as my god tells me to.
ruining the party by telling the old news that he loves the gentile just as much as every jew.