In 2016-17, I engaged in a daily practice for the first 100 days of a presidency, blogging about fake news and matters of civic decency, and as often as not sharing the page with friends and colleagues. That became a website with 100 Hard Truths about Fake News: #100hardtruths-#fakenews.
For many years after, I ran workshops with poets around the world together thinking about those hard truths and the words of other participants: fakenews-poetry.org.
Those poems became a book, My Phone Lies to Me, published by punctum press (available to download for free).
On Friday, March 14, from 10:15 am-12 pm EST about 15-20 participants in this project (writers, poets, teachers, friends), will read poems from this collection. They may also have written new poems, to fit this 100 days and how matters of truth, the internet, and civic society have changed. They may speak about the workshop process and what can be useful or not in this time. There will be time for discussion or the reading of more poems after the one-hour reading. The reading will also be recorded as part of punctum’s Encounters at the End of the Book series.
It is good to be together with poetry at this time. There will be time for discussion or the reading of more poems after the one-hour reading.
Evite for the ZOOM.
On Suicide Notes in Place of Passports
Migrants were born from the river’s cavernous mouth
Cradled by overgrown bamboo and caña de azúcar
Ripe mango flesh dripping from our teeth
Caked in the desert’s grime
Abuelita’s palms fold in a symphony of praise
Her tongue wisps a language of smoke
Dense and oily, her words hang stagnant in the air
She keeps it tucked away in her diaphragm
Her lips imprinted with N-400 form
Naturalization isn’t possible when your body is already considered unearthly
While burning sage to keep the spirits away
Says “Hay un remedio para todo excepto la muerte”
There is a remedy for everything except death
Someone pray for the undocumented immigrants
The infants swaddled in crimson
Product of rape by border patrol
Dehydrated bodies cremated into sand dunes
Empty water jugs rolling like tumbleweeds
We hand down heartache like heirlooms
Recuerdos of suicide notes and bullet shells
For Jose de Jesus Deniz Sahagun, 31
Screams echoing off isolated cell walls
Copper teeth grinding against the ache of vacancy
We keep mistaking detention center for death sentence
He stuffed his esophagus with socks
Attempted to take his life 3 times before
A testament to the torture behind closed doors
For Joaquin Luna, 18
Who carved out his obituary in spiral notebooks
God’s greed gave him a gun
Holy bearer of bullets
Dressed in his Sunday best
He couldn’t be an architect without papers
So he sprinkled blueprints with lighter fluids
Envisioned the contrast of vermillion stains on his cream shirt
Formulated the spatial composition of the bathroom and his body
Mapped out his apology in blue blood
He shot himself a week before receiving his college acceptance letter
I can’t bear anymore eulogies
My bedtime stories are news reports
Sometimes I can’t tell real from fake
Alternative facts scream ICE raids in the wrong places
Tombstones cluttered my closet
Each inscription with the date scraped out
From when I wanted to die at 7, 10, 13, 15
Home is only 3 letters away from homily
And I will worship every god to keep this family whole
Turn our bodies into sanctuary
Welcome to this holy house
I keep waiting for a resurrection
But the dead don’t dance on the devil’s back.
-Arlene Campa
A response to #100hardtruths-#fakenews #20: “Stress Related to Immigration Status is One Result.”
See its Video-Poem (#17) created at a second workshop with Get Lit here: https://partnerandpartners.gitlab.io/alex-juhasz/media/new.html. This poem was written by Arlene Campa in March 2018 at a workshop at Get Lit, an LA group for youth poetry.