I See You

By Laura Martinez

First you are “pollo”
chicken.
Then you are “illegal”
just so much contraband
or “alien”
strange creature from another place
to be feared.
Less than human.

I walk with you
through the streets of Nogales,
sit with you as you prepare
for your journey,
as you pray the rosary.

I see you in the desert
exhausted and thirsty,
and I see your haunted eyes
as you are detained, chained and
branded a “criminal.”
The smell of broken dreams
permeates the air.

You are a human being,
someone’s husband, mother,
daughter, son,
who lives, loves,
suffers, endures,
never deterred from the promise
of a better, safer life.

I am a retired social worker and volunteer with a local humanitarian aid group that supplies water to migrants in the desert. I also am with a local group that coordinates nationally to end the criminalization of migration. My poems have been published locally in the Tucson Weekly and Arizona Daily Star. I am a regular contributor to an online magazine, Downtown LA Life.

Photo credit: Jasper Nance via a Creative Commons license.