Practice Standing Unleashed and Clean

 ^{Upon their arrival in America, more than twelve million immigrants were processed through the Ellis Island Immigration Center. Those who had traveled in second or third class were immediately given a thirty-second health inspection to determine if they were fit to enter their new country. A chalk checkmark on their clothing signaled a health problem and meant a stay in the Ellis Island Immigrant Hospital, where they either recovered or, if deemed incurable, were kept until they could be sent back home. Even if just one family member was sick, that person’s entire family was turned away.}

Hide the awkward jolt of jawline, the fluttering eye, that wide

brazen slash of boat-burned skin. Count each breath in order

to pacify the bloodless roiling just beneath the rib, to squelch

the mushrooming boom of tumor. Give fever another name.

I open my mouth, just to moan, but instead cluttered nouns,

so unAmerican, spew from my throat and become steam

in the room. That heat ripples through the meandering queue

of souls and someone who was once my uncle grows dizzy

with not looking at me. I am asked to temporarily unbutton

the clawing children from my heavy skirt, to pull the rough

linen blouse over my head and through my thick salted hair.

A last shelter thuds hard, pools around my feet on the floor.

I traveled with a whole chattering country’s restless mass

weakening my shoulders. But I offer it as both yesterday

and muscle. I come to you America, scrubbed almost clean,

but infected with memory and the bellow of broiling spices

in a long-ago kitchen. I come with a sickness insistent upon

root in my body, a sickness that may just be a frantic twist

from one life’s air to another. I ask for nothing but a home

with windows of circled arms, for a warm that overwhelms

the tangled sounds that say my name. I ask for the beaten

woman with her torch uplifted to find me here and loose

my new face of venom and virus. I have practiced standing

unleashed and clean. I have practiced the words I know.

So I pray this new country receive me, stark naked now,

forearms chapped raw, although I am ill in underneath ways.

I know that I am freakish, wildly fragrant, curious land. I stink

of seawater and the oversea moonwash I conjured to restart

and restart my migrant heart. All I can be is here, stretched

between solace and surrender, terrified of the dusty mark

that identifies me as poison in every one of the wrong ways.

I could perish here on the edge of everything. Or the chalk

mark could be a wing on my breastbone, unleashing me

in the direction of light. Someone will help me find my clothes

and brush the salt from my hair. I am marked perfect, and

I hear the word heal in a voice I thought I brought from home.