Questionnaire For Immigration Status

by James Diaz / December 13th, 2015

What is your name?
What country are you from?
Are you friendly or fierce?
Have you seen what we’re capable of?
Have you figured out by now that it’s for your own good,
why we do the things that we are capable of to you?
Do you know what goodness is?
Do you understand that we are the good guys here?
Do you relinquish your right to be considered a whole person?
Do you understand that we will never truly accept you?
That we will always find you suspect, capable of causing great harm?
Do you understand that this is an act of love on our part?
Considering you dangerous?
That this is the only way we know how to love a foreigner,
with deeply embedded suspicion in our hearts?
Have you lost people because of us?
Parents? Children? Homes?
Are you angry because of this?
Because of who and what you’ve lost?
Do you understand that all of that, what you’ve lost, means nothing to us?
That it is what needed to be done in order to expand market share and global power?
Do you forgive us?
Do you think we care, whether or not you forgive us?
Do you think that we need forgiveness?
Do you believe that we can be forgiven, after all that we have done?
All that we will still do?
Don’t forgive us, for we know exactly what it is we do.

James Diaz is the author of This Someone I Call Stranger (2018, Indolent Books) and editor of the forthcoming anthology What Keeps us Here: Songs from The Other Side of Trauma. In 2016 he founded the online literary arts and music journal Anti-Heroin Chic to provide a platform for often unheard voices, including those struggling with addiction, mental illness and Prison/confinement. He resides in upstate New York, in between balanced rocks and horse farms. He has never believed in anything as strongly as he does the power of poetry to help heal a shattered life. Read other articles by James.

This article was posted on Sunday, December 13th, 2015 at 8:02am and is filed under Poetry.