Claim your rocking chairs and
Your solipsistic sunsets,
But close your eyes and listen.
The cicadas have silenced, and listen!
Is it quiet?

Bibles, Torahs, and Bhagavad Gitas
Turn into laminated eviction notices or zoning ordinances stapled unregretfully to cracked doors
Function like scripture, the
unquestionable, abstract, 
preached by priests who don’t live within their consequences.

And there—the anterior part of your head.
The fetal pig might say marred
I say that the thing in-between of your pancreas and your large intestine
Leaves the noise
For the solitude of oblivious sunsets.

Watch the names fade from mailboxes,
The floor forget the weight of what once stood
And as Santa Muerte reaches for you
I hope you spare us a glance
Because we will look for you often,
too.

• AUTHOR’s NOTE: Renee Nicole Macklin wrote the American Poets award winning poem “On Learning To Dissect Fetal Pigs” back in 2020. It is highly recommended to read her poem beforehand, as it not only is a powerful piece of literature, but this poem engages with and responds to Macklin’s piece.

This poem was originally created in January, 2026.

Disclaimer:
I am not a pretentious fool.
I know my worth.
I am not going to write about
How the spirit of the people who built this country
Sways with the wind in our flag!!!!11!!!!1!!

No.
Cuz they didn’t build this country.
At least, not for the most part.
We seem too often to forget the sacrifices
Of those with a little more melanin
Or a little less money
Than us.

At the risk of repeating myself,
I am not a pretentious fool.
I am not going to write
About the white men
Building this country now.
Cuz they’re not, but

My mom is,
With her kindness
Which she channels into her work
And her food.

My dad is,
With his strength
Which he channels into his carpentry
And his love for all of us.

My brother is,
With his life
And his liberty
And his pursuit of happiness

And all their spreading of it.

I am not a pretentious fool.
I don’t tend to prescribe definitions to people.
But when I see
My mother laying spices out to dry
My dad sawing away at a plank of wood (walnut, he says)
My brother excited because his hard work payed off
Their hands glow red, white, and blue.

So when I see the men on TV
Preaching their hate crimes like gospel
All I see
Is the crimson red
Staining their soft hands.

I hate that 
Icarus gets all the ink. 
His hubris penned down for eternity while 
His scorched flesh watched on. 

But never is it Daedalus. 
Daedalus, who waits. 
The waiting Daedalus. 

He whose only thought is of memory, 
Of feathers floating on the surface of majestic blue waters, 
Waves moving like music. 

And perhaps now he wishes he hadn’t left. 
Perhaps he wishes for prison, for confinement to the grey brick walls 
Would surely be more comfort than the prison of his mind. 

And he might sometimes still walk the sandy shores and miss it all. 
His son, his wings, his flaws. 
And still he waits. 
Daedalus, who waits. 
The waiting Daedalus. 

And I looked, and there was this ugly brown girl asking for some less brownness, perhaps.

I was not God, and I could not have made it so, and it broke my heart right in two– to look at this here brown girl, who was ugly by her own standard.

Before what I saw that time, there was a smaller girl. She was pretty (by her own standard), and so then, when she asked for the change, I had sat there rather awkwardly because I didn’t know it was a long time gone since she felt comfortable in her own skin.

So I stared her down, right through her ugly golden-flecked hazel eyes, and wished right then and there that I could work miracles.

I wanted awful bad to take her head and lay it along the road line;
Wanted horribly for an eighteen-wheeler to come along and pacify her mind.

And the leaves changed colors.
She did not.

I waited long.
Watched the vibrance fade from the trees,
As Shakespeare turned to Plato, and then Socrates–

She wanted blue eyes.
I turned away mine.

I came from mountains.
From the memory of تبدیل,
Of change,
Regurgitated from the depths of what may have been.

I came from spring.
From the hope of نوی صبح, 
Of a new tomorrow,
Thrown from one not-home to the next
Confused about what may be.

My family calls me their زُو ,
their soul,
But meaning so much more
Their tether to this life.

But they ask:
And what ruins a ruin?
The memories of the past.
And why must you yearn for what you have lost?
The memories they own must last.

I’m holding your frail body by its throat.
Ribs showing, spine poking from your back,
More skeleton than flesh,
You stare back at me.

My intention is not for your pain.
I am but a marionette.
Your starvation is set in my strings.

You’re less than three feet tall.
After all, you are all small.
All shades of brown.

I can’t tear my gaze from your form.
I am guilty of these crimes.
Sabr, sabr, sabr.
Patience, patience, patience.

I will bide my time.
I will learn, then grow,
And it may cost you your life.
But when the time comes,
And it will,
I will strike.
We will.

Sabr, sabr, sabr.
Patience, patience, patience.

For now, though,
I see my shame hidden within your reflection.
I see the sadness in your eyes.
And momentarily, I am afraid–
Can you see mine?

I was supposed to be named Amina
After a dream my mother had once
Calling out to me, Amina.

I think about this often.
Amina feels almost foreign on my tongue–
Ahh-minn-uhh.

Amina is loud.
She speaks well and her palms
Never sweat when someone asks her a question.

She’s got good posture.
Her back never aches
From long hours curled over a keyboard.

I see her everywhere.
In good outfits
And successes.

Being everything that I’ll never be.

But there’s this other thing.
Amina doesn’t know how to keep going after
Sending a text to the group chat instead of to your best friend.

She’ll never know how to laugh
When she’s got sand in her nails
And salt in her hair.

I am everything that Amina will never be.

And if I ever meet her
I’ll tell her it’s okay
To slouch
And breathe
Just for a little while.

when you go to the emergency room
they ask you to rate your pain on a scale of one to ten 

as if i had just been to a fancy restaurant 
i hope you liked getting a third degree burn! how would you rate it from one to ten?

the nurse won’t get it if i tell her that i have a stroke and
i can’t speak properly (freedom of what?)
my chest hurts (feel the pain of my darker counterparts)
my limbs feel heavy (crumble under the quiet exhaustion of chasing the dream)
i can already hear her response.
so like an eight?

and eventually i’ll have to tell her no, you have to prescribe me pills.
she calls it depression
i call it misdiagnosis.
we are not speaking the same language
even though we both call it english.

i can’t stand up properly anymore.
there is a storm in my chest and i can’t find shelter.
eight, it’s an eight, i repeat like a broken record.
I am speaking her language, but she won’t listen.

i guess somewhere in me I know.
the small blue tablets won’t mend the 
cracks in the soil i call home
cracks in the red, white, and blue
cracks in
me.

Warped fingerprints on the same glass
Chocolate cake crumbs on the same plate
While celestial eyes watch behind our shoulders
Here it is, like our last night alive;

As the atom bomb burns it all to the ground
And Satan stands, impressed
It’s you that I smile with–
While our organs shut it in
And our hearts start to falter
It’s only you that I’ll watch TV with;

And as the winged seraphs of heaven
envy you and envy me
While the missile heads our way
And we walk on to extinction
It’s you
I’ll welcome death with.

Did you know that
When you draw Sharpie lines around an ant
The ant can’t cross it?
It’s so silly–
The ant trapped by invisible lines!
But then I think of stop signs
And green lights
And old people in red ties
And suddenly
it doesn’t seem
all that silly
after all.