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      March 31, 2024Exodus 15:21Miguel Barretto Garcia

      There are pages of home
      work left open on the table.
      The way there are plenty
      of leftovers in the fridge.
      Here I am left on the fringes.
       
      This desolate place I call
      home. The TV at some point
      started to hiss. No more reality
      show kissing scenes. No more
      breaking news. Reality is white
       
      noise with a white dress dancing
      to a Poltergeist. Kitchen cabinets
      stocked with bottles of
      prescriptions. White tablets
      of antacids for upset stomachs.
       
      Light blue sertraline pills
      for the nerves. In the morning
      I break the fast. All I know
      that something is broken:
      The yellow bus no longer passes by
       
      my street. My teacher keeps
      calling our landline but my mother
      is wearing thick black headphones,
      cancelling all her appointments
      including motherhood.
       
      I crack the egg and whisk it
      until my mother stops breaking down.
      I learned how to change the oil
      of our car, but I’m still figuring
      the ways to keep the ballerina figurines
       
      from falling onto the hardwood floor.
      Our house leaves no secrets
      and our house has plenty of them.
      All of them demons in the freezer
      waiting for the day the social
       
      worker knocks on our door
      and takes me to another version
      of hell. I do have faith
      in our Protective Services just as I
      have faith in the God
       
      Moses prayed to. The last
      time I was in Sunday School
      the needle screeched on the turntable
      and the living room was the sound
      of old ‘50s Hollywood. My father
       
      used to be a happy man. My father
      used to be alive. When he checked
      out from this world, I checked out
      the cold silence of my mother’s bed.
      Death sleeps beside my mother
       
      the way a child clings to their mother
      to the sound of thunder.
      My mother is the child. Nothing
      in our textbooks prepared me
      to mother my mother.
       
      Nothing is the mother
      I bring close to my milkless bosom.
      Here, I sing to the Lord America’s
      requiem. Here, I hold her close as if
      we were no longer the parted sea.

      from Poets Respond

      Miguel Barretto Garcia

      “I wrote this poem as a form of response to the problem of chronic absenteeism in US schools. Currently, the student absences have only exacerbated since the pandemic. I feel like there is more to the story. The pandemic not only affected children’s relationship with schools, but it has also affected the way families have to navigate through the frictions in the workforce. Post-pandemic, parents also suffer from anxieties and work-related imposter’s syndrome in ways that are similar or even more concerning. In several cases, it’s the children that end up buffering the internal struggles that parents have to deal with, and in some instances, they end up stepping up to the role of parent, and consequently foregoing their education. This is a dimension of post-pandemic life that I wanted to explore through this poem.”

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