A love letter to the displaced

Isabella Acuña | Spring 2023

I see them when I close my eyes at the draw of another hateful day,
souls sifting through the dirt of Dante’s fifth circle of rage,
searching for a place to let their callused tear ducts melt, decay,
and surrender to the futility of tired ribs and age.

I live in a brethren of patriotic orphanage.
Eternal infants screaming for where to pay homage,
mourning ancestors turned farmers, gold sifters
once free in the robbed land of Alamo drifters.

What does it mean to spit fire at an ancestor’s loss?
Lush organs of green and arteries of sand and capillaries of moss,
a country’s body made into a war amputee.
I cry falsely believing a People’s blood was bled for me.

I cry, for when this twisted spine lays to its final cot,
its lonely tears will have nowhere honest to claim as its tomb,
no place to plant roots of sorrow, untie its corrupted knots,
left rotten by terrestrial grief, a displaced syndrome.