Mourning America

We were told that it would simmer as long as the sky was blue

For a country as wide as a kitchen light

Steam curling up from a single shared pot

Where names dissolved but they never dissapeared

Where an accent was seasoning not evidence

When the word melting was spoken in gentle tones

as though heat is not violence

as though steel remembers how to forget itself

I try to locate in the map of my mind when it stopped being a metaphor

and turned into paperwork nailed to the door

a hand knocks rather than opening like a neighborhood friend

a name spoken slower

not to understand it

but to see if it survives being said in the wrong rhythm

Somewhere the pot is still on the stove

a promise, a myth

but the ingredients have learned one another's edges

and nothing blends anymore

everything must identify itself before it is allowed to boil

we built an alphabet of belonging

and then chose the letters that were illegal to pronounce

I remember swearing in to serve alongside a nation of immigrants

like a hymn that we all knew by heart

back when we still believed that history was something you entered

not an invitation for more questions

Now there is another language

under every conversation

forms, files, status and verification

even silence has to prove it belongs here

and somewhere in all of that machinery

the clean cut bueracratic mercy

there are rooms where names are not spoken

only checked

I will not utter the softened name

arrival without thunder

no need for the roars in the sky

arriving in clipboards and flourescent lights

in the way that footsteps make no sounds on the pavement

when they are trained not to hesitate

arrives as a decision already made before the story is even told

the words would be muttered as "melting pot"

as if heat meant unity rather than erasure

as if fire only every meant warmth

and not the sound of something

learning that it was never safe

Now i finally understand

the recipe was never meant to be finished

only to seperate

somethings do not melt

they are weighed

and the nation that we buried under that language

that bright imagined country of a shared becoming

does not rest peacefully

It haunts us in the accents that we correct too quickly

in the doors that we lock without remembering when we first learned to lock them

in the uneasy calculations deciding who gets to stay

and who must live forever explainable

if this is what it built

then call it what it is

not a pot

A ledger of permission

A flame that remembers only how to sort

A house that dreams of being empty so it never has to decide who stays