They just fall away from the world.
All the little Roma and Uyghur kids,
the boys being sent back to Kosovo,
they completely buy into Sweden.
They feel a deep pressure in their brains
and ears. They pound their fists against
the wall and slowly descend into coma,
their heads flopping down at their sides.
The feeding tubes enter through the nostril.
The mothers weep and stare at their hands.
They have no asylum, no future that can be
salvaged and finally made secure.
They suffer from poisoned hopefulness,
a crisis of existence at the age of nine
that makes them shut down, supports
knocked clear, their life story veering off course.
Such resigned apathy is not an isolated
act of the imagination’s force.
I have seen refugees from their working days
rage in their despair. Those lost in
little rural towns turn to alcohol and meth,
labor sacrificed on the altar of finance.
I have seen women whose nightmares
have come to life and surfaced as a threat,
men who left their homes to find out where
they might prosper best. I have seen trust
expertly pierced by speech turned to a point.
All manners of trauma spill from
an unsettled fate. It’s not the destiny
anyone bargains for to wander about,
dispatched from the land of empathy
where you’ve come to learn the language,
but it decides to snow some more.
Tim Kahl [http://www.timkahl.com] is the author of Possessing Yourself (CW Books, 2009), The Century of Travel (CW Books, 2012) and The String of Islands (Dink, 2015). His work has been published in Prairie Schooner, Drunken Boat, Mad Hatters’ Review, Indiana Review, Metazen, Ninth Letter, Sein und Werden, Notre Dame Review, The Really System, Konundrum Engine Literary Magazine, The Journal, The Volta, Parthenon West Review, Caliban and many other journals in the U.S. He is also editor of Clade Song [http://www.cladesong.com]. He is the vice president and events coordinator of The Sacramento Poetry Center. He also has a public installation in Sacramento {In Scarcity We Bare The Teeth}. He plays flutes, guitars, ukuleles, charangos and cavaquinhos. He currently teaches at California State University, Sacramento, where he sings lieder while walking on campus between classes.
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