Australia

At school we draw in the margins of our notebook paper

and toy with the idea of moving to Australia. 

We look up the latest news in between classes, knowing that

the teachers will think we're addicted to our phones.

Really we're paranoid, our fingernails

bitten to the quick.

We watch a week pass and wonder

how it's already begun to feel normal, 

the creeping dread like a tidal wave,

the kind of dread

that is usually reserved for exam season.

Sometimes we forget

but hardly ever.

My Italian friends

joke that we'll be deported

and I laugh along with them, thinking of the families

who cried tears of joy

when they got their papers,

who will be forced to return

to countries marked by devastation

and the purple-blue-black of endless night.

The Statue of Liberty

stands stony-faced, her torch outstretched

like a false promise.

Like a goodbye.

In the South, a woman

receives two red lines like a death sentence. She knows

the way men twist their need to control

into poisonous protection, stripping her 

of the decision to wait. She cries,

because she voted 

to never have to fear two red lines again, she voted

secretly, fervent hope in the privacy of a ballot box.

She cries,

and she tells her coworkers it's allergies.

My mother cancels

her New York Times subscription.

She walks our dog

along the meadow that winds behind our house

in the sunniest part of the day

and calls it coping.

She says we can focus on ourselves, on our family

and everything else will melt away like sugar cubes

in the herbal tea she makes for me.

I try to believe her.

I read long articles

about the American dream, and learn nothing

as I sit in the car and forest gives way to town,

home gives way to school, fatigue still

blurring the edges of everything, night still

clinging to day. I think of

my ancestors and their fantasies of streets paved with gold

as my father's tires roll over the pavement.

I count the days.

64, which still feels

impossibly long. 

64, which will soon

curl into nothing.