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The person you are trying
is not accepting. Is not
at this time. Please
again. The person
you are trying is not
in service. Please check
that you have. This
is your call. Your
person is not accepting.
Your person is this
number. You have
not correctly. Your person
is a recording. Again later
at this time. Not accepting.
Copyright © 2020 by Martha Collins. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 12, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.
If you were Chinese, you had (mostly) been excluded since 1882.
If you were Japanese, things were complex after 1907–8.
If you were anything else, you were not excluded as such in 1916
although there were many who thought you should be
if you were the eastern or southern European
that you increasingly were: Russian / Polish
Jewish Italian Polish Slavic Greek . . .
—and you could have been excluded as a convict
lunatic beggar pauper polygamist anarchist
stock strain family line
breed blood skin shape
of the head of the pack
animal human judge
better fitter swiftly
to find foot horse car run
for your life around
town the block the camp
not as in pin, the kind that keeps the wheels
turning, and not the strip of land that marks
the border between two fields. unrelated
to link, as in chain, or by extension whatever
connects one part to another, and therefore
not a measure of a chain, which in any
case is less than the span of a hand hold-
ing the reins, the rope, the hoe, or taking
something like justice into itself, as when
a captain turned judge and gave it his name.
that was before it lost its balance and crossed
the border, the massed body of undoers