Refugee

Pamela Uschuk

• Publisher: Red Hen Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781636280196
• eBook ISBN: 9781636280202
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

Taking the reader across our country through the varied landscapes of Colorado, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Arizona, Refugee discusses the nature of seeking shelter. We are all refugees looking for a haven from whatever oppresses our lives. What constitutes a refugee is at the heart of the collection. Poems confront and explore xenophobia, sexism, gun violence, domestic violence, corporate greed, and their ties to environmental destruction and political and economic tyranny. An ovarian cancer survivor, the author also writes about her own courageous confrontation with death. These inspiring poems ultimately call for the reader to recognize the refugee condition as a human condition. They call for a change in consciousness in the forms of action and compassion. They call for the reader to thrive. Ranging from short lyric poems to narrative poems, this collection steeped in rich, sensual imagery draws inspiration and healing from the natural world. Truth lies in recognition of the interdependence of all life. Refugee is an odyssey to find grace and unity in a besieged and divided contemporary American society.     

SPEAKING OF ANGELS AND GHOSTS

WESTERN TANAGER

for Fenton Johnson

Back from hiking the far mountains, I find

your desiccated body perfect, black wings

tucked under the slick yellow back,

orange head intact but for eyes eaten by sky.

Slim sarcophagus you bear no wounds.

Neither owl, cat, or hawk tried to eat you.

Your petrified beak cocks its last song

to the invisible sea beyond Sombero Peak. Sleek,

your mummified carcass offers no clues.

Were you smashed to earth by monsoon or

did our picture window lure you to secure

branches growing in glass?

Beauty, I can’t bury you, won’t disturb your solemn rest

on the picnic table among presidential lies

in the New York Times, bellowing his urgent need

to build a twenty-foot-high steel wall to secure our border

from unarmed refugees. You nestle with turret shells

from the Sea of Cortez, a sand dollar said to

contain the crucifixion, lovely beyond belief.

Lithe acrobat

too rarely have I seen you flip

through memory’s eucalyptus leaves.

Where do you sing?

A full moon collapses

like the Halloween pumpkins on the porch.

I gentle you weightless to my shelf.

Time never rests,

its ghost prints leading us over a horizon giddy

with insistent light

we cannot conceive will ever end.

MORNING COFFEE

In my mug the ghosts of berries,

cut shine of rubies handpicked

inside burlap bags rocking on burros

upslope in Colombia, berries grown on trees

speaking the old language of clouds and poverty, seized

each afternoon by the hands of rain,

and shaken like children from dreams.

It starts here while the toucan sleeps

in rain forest squeezed by ocean and Andes.

Coffee is the eye of Cortez widening to burn herons

and flamingos in Aztec aviaries, coffee

the hand of Quetzalcoatl trembling as he lifts

a smoking mirror to see the blond giant, murdering.

Coffee does not run light as a gecko

across the tongue so much as curl between teeth,

waking me to a neighborhood of sirens

and domestic screams, to the sheet music of a mother’s laughter

plaiting her daughter’s hair, to the insults

of politicians on TV hydroplaning like car tires in a torrent,

to my fingertips drenched in caffeine

tapping like centipedes stampeding my kitchen table

under which the sleeping dog of reason breathes.

WEATHER CHANGE

for Terri Harvey

Wind slithers through oleander leaves like schools of salmon ghosts,

the iced relics of steelhead fins or silver lining rainbow trout cheeks

I held long ago as a girl. Sky chills even hidden scars.

The voices of desert birds are far away water trickling over a granite ledge.

Call out the colors of clean air, sweet, filling

the cancered lungs of my brother in the last veteran’s hospice bed.

Call clean air for the lungs of women in Damascus or Kabul

who secretly perm the hair of other women in their homes

while husbands cloister, click beads, tongues lashing from tight mouths,

ignoring the slight breeze of words lilted by wives smothered

by centuries of swaddling cloth, by the slavery and comfort of veils.

Call sweet air. Fresh air for the mother bent into worry’s hook,

air for the premature baby whose moth-wing lungs

struggle for flight in a neonatal unit across town,

air for the homeless man wandering paved drives

in our foothills community still asleep, his shoulders

drenched by a daypack so grimy its history is the cruelty of char.

Air for the pit bull snoring in a treeless gravel yard, chained

to a stake broiling in desert sun while his teen owner, a new

father, bags meth in his mother’s bathroom.

Air for a child’s hands closing on the first baseball of her life,

for the proton in the eye of the observer that changes

what a woman sees as love halfway across the globe.

Air for all of us, breathing memory’s luminous mind,

the way quietly it says goodbye

from a river we will wade long after we say goodbye.

REFUGE

for Terry Acevedo

Since January, sun can’t stop shivering.

Hope shakes her head, refuses to step inside the front door,

so we drive to San Xavier Mission smudged with mesquite smoke,

the thousand melted roses of perfumed candle wax.

Worn out, we retreat from paranoid tweets,

the confused sleight of hand from the Commander-in-Chief.

Who knows how many Russian pockets the President has lined?

Incarcerating migrant children along the border is the strategy of lies.

Under white bell towers, time reverses its hungry grind

patted by the hands of O’odham ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• SKULL SONG
• AXIS
• LIQUID BOOK OF THE DEAD
• SPEAKING OF ANGELS AND GHOSTS
• Biographical Note
• Back Cover