Our Ghosts Are Present Tense
Prague's morning folds
like an old letter,
its edges softened
by time and loss,
a city of survived silences,
trams tracking scars
across cobbled skin.
I'm foreign here again,
with passport permission.
They say this makes me safe,
but a stamp is thin asylum—
history teaches quiet suspicion,
doorways know how shadows wait.
Across an ocean, my birthplace
breaks the bones of promises:
ICE vans as dark as cattle cars,
due process rerouted online,
while children whisper unanswered
in doorways left empty.
Legal residents are now erased,
mouths gagged and wrists zipped tight,
lives excised by red ink and signatures—
justice, a closed-court spectacle,
is shipped to private rented cells
The bitter weight of paper
mutes screams like snowfall—
“Temporary”
I walk Prague counting brass plaques,
tracing ghost names worn smooth,
my tongue twisted by the consonants
of families once disappeared—
do we still call it history
when it never ceased its haunting?
My queer body moves slow,
bones wary, trembling
under the threat of erasure—
the state's gaze finds difference,
defines it, tracks it, files it away,
waiting to rewrite the conditions
of our right to exist.
I fold mourning like the laundry,
ache for fathers deported mid-dinner,
plates still steaming, shoes untied,
images of childhood sliced sudden,
cleaved from belonging like limbs—
and wonder how countries learn so well
to carve apart families like meat.
Written in bloodlines and borders,
a thousand laws deceive, deliberate:
safety nets turned to snares,
visas revoked between clock-ticks—
homelands dissolved under our feet—
there are no warning shots
when law is the weapon.
I no longer recognize my homeland,
but I’ve always known it this way
even when I didn't see how often
its stars were burned with gasoline,
its eagle was strangled by violence.
This is the freedom that has always dragged
humans from factories, hospitals, dreams
to prisons built of forgotten files,
quietly shredded before dawn.
This mourning is an inheritance:
watching families become headlines,
yet again, catalogued casualties
in archives I'll never live to read.
Each dawn my shadow greets me,
asks timidly if today is the day
someone writes my obituary in newsprint,
misspells my name in quick ink—
foreign body, collateral damage,
legal at the wrong time, wrong place,
erased by a footnote,
voice hushed like ash, falling quietly
on freshly rewritten borders.
I hold memories warm
inside my lungs, say their names slow
in solidarity with the erased, the disappeared.
I remember here, now, openly,
we must sharpen outrage into a blade,
that blade into truth, truth into resistance.
Let us bare that blade against oppression,
glinting sunlight into dark corners,
slicing through iron bars.
Let their captive birds escape,
carrying in their tongues
the names of all else who disappeared.
Let us hold onto each other fiercely,
no matter the weight of history,
no matter the shadows of borders.
We will carve space for our breath,
for our bodies to exist, to be known.
Let us be evidence, openly,
beautifully here—
our complicated names,
our stubborn survival.
Our voices will rise together,
woven from the threads of those lost,
never to be silenced again.
History must not silence us again.
Prague's morning folds like an old letter, its edges softened by time and loss, a city of survived silences, trams tracking scars across cob
